History

1980

Randal began a freelance illustration career working from his home studio in the Chicago area for designers, ad agencies, corporations, publishers, and others. He specialized in line art illustration, architectural renderings, technical and product illustration used in corporate communications, advertising and print promotion. He expanded into other markets including New York, Atlanta, Dallas and Minneapolis working through artist reps in those cities.

1986

Randal purchased an Apple Mac Plus computer with 1 MB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive and a dot matrix printer and began to teach himself to use this new tool to aid in the illustration and design process. Within a few years, he was a leader in the print and illustration industry of Chicago, teaching his clients and other communications art associates in how to incorporate and leverage emerging new digital technologies. Randal has been using Adobe products since version 1.0, as well as products that were eventually purchased by Adobe such as Aldus Freehand, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and many others.

Randal assisted a customer in setting up an authorized Apple Reseller in the later 1980’s before moving his business into multimedia and eventually web design.

1996

Randal purchased the BIRKEY.COM domain in 1996, figuring he should have the domain of his own last name. Within the next year, he taught himself to code in HTML using an Adobe product called PageMill, and set up a web and email hosting account at TheRamp.net, a Chicago area ISP. This was back in the days of 28K and 56K modems, dial-up accounts, and Netscape Navigator version 1.0!

Randal used this website from 1996-1999 for providing information and promoting my own freelance illustration and design business, as well as his brother’s beekeeping website at Beesource.com.

You can see from the early web 1.0 web design below that he used some standard web design approaches typical of that time:

• A repeating image in the background
• Navigation links along the left hand side organized in a column of a table
• Written content and images went in the right hand column of the table
• I got fancy with animated .GIF images nestled in the body copy

Notice the link in the upper left hand column to the Association for Multimedia Communications. Randal served on the board of that organization at the time working with: Harvey Tillis, Dave Boller, Barry Koehler, Lou Morelli, Lee Hoffner, Paul Marvine, Michael Mizen, Tim Schwaar, Michael Schaffner, and many others.

At the bottom of this early web page is a reference that Randal had just changed his hosting from his first ISP – TheRamp, to Morelli Systems. His AMC friend Lou Morelli had offered to host the site at the Morelli Systems data center. It was through working with Lou that Randal eventually met Mark Goeke, who became a good friend and brought BIRKEY.COM a lot of new business and web clients in the years 1999-2007 after leaving Morelli.

BIRKEY.COM in 1998

Also included on this page was contact information to Randal’s artist rep, Connie Koralik.

1999

Randal was looking through the archives of the Way Back Machine, and was reminded of what the illustration website looked like on October 12, 1999. This was the second version of the web site design.

The concept was inspired by the LaSalle Partners website at that time. Since he was doing a lot of architectural illustration (including La Salle Partners), the idea of using a building metaphor was a natural. Randal used his architectural illustration background to design and illustrate the images, and create the interface.

Randal was still publicizing his membership and involvement in the AMC. His site was also still hosted with Morelli Systems, and even had a banner ad on the site for Morelli. He was also using a visitor counter… something very common and popular back then.

BIRKEY.COM in 1999

November 2001

Below is the third major redesign of the BIRKEY.COM site since it was founded by Randal Birkey in 1996. This version (3.0) was done a collaboration with the Creative Director of BIRKEY.COM, Corey Wilkinson. This was he first design that communicated the merge of BIRKEY.COM with Midwest Information Systems, Inc. as a Chicago web design firm.

We used a “retro” look and color palette, and built the site in Microsoft ASP, with a SQL Server database Backstage. When you rolled over the navigation items on the left, the TV screen displayed different retro style images. The “circle B” logo was animated using the animated .GIF format.

2006

The final installment in this retrospective was in April 2006, as the BIRKEY.COM website was relaunched with a version 4.0 redesign, as can be viewed in the Way Back Machine. The interface and logo was designed in by Corey Wilkinson, Creative Director at BIRKEY.COM. It is a database-driven site managed by the Birkey Backstage, a custom Content Management System (CMS), built in classic Microsoft .ASP and MS SQL Server.

2007

Randal sold his BIRKEY.COM web design business and formed a new web 2.0 media company headquartered in Chicago at 333 W. Wacker Dr.

2009

After the buyers of Randal’s former business rebranded the company as “Bolder Image,” the BIRKEY.COM domain was returned to Randal’s control and switched back to its original use as Randal Birkey’s illustration portfolio website – full circle from its beginnings in 1996.