FUNHOUSE 57
Dick Daniels · 2016 · Web design, Build, Hosting · Visit the site →
Five decades of illustration, ceramics and oddball basement projects, spread across four media and no single address.
Dick Daniels is a Kansas City-born illustrator, painter, ceramicist and, by his own description, part-time junk collector. A child of the fifties who came up through the underground comix movement, American folk art and cheap commercial packaging — and it shows in everything he makes.
He spent five years illustrating at The Kansas City Star and has been a card artist for Shoebox Greetings and Hallmark since the late eighties. For fun he makes wooden signs in a basement studio buried in carnival punks, Rat Fink model kits, processed cheese boxes and half-finished robots, and he volunteers with the Kansas City Clay Guild making ceramic skulls, masks and rabbits.
Dick had a long-running blog and a great deal of work, and no way to show anyone the shape of a career. The illustration, the mixed media pieces, the Waterlogue prints and the ceramics had accumulated over decades in four different directions at once.
A blog is a stream. It is excellent for “here is what I made this week” and useless for “here is what I do.” Anyone arriving cold had to scroll backwards through years to work out whether Dick was an illustrator or a potter, and the answer is that he is both and several other things besides.
We built a site organised by medium rather than by date — mixed media, Waterlogue, prints, ceramics, each with its own room. That is how people actually look for his work: someone who wants a ceramic mask does not want to scroll past four years of illustration first.
We left the blog exactly where it was. Migrating fifteen years of posts into a new system would have cost real money, risked breaking links other people had made, and gained nothing Dick wanted. The site links to it and gets on with its own job. The bio page is the other thing we insisted on, because Dick describing his own basement is better copy than anything we could write about him.
The work is loud, funny and full of colour, so the site is not. Simple structure, plain navigation, and then Dick’s pieces doing all of the talking.
The name is FunHouse57 and it would have been easy to over-egg that. We kept the character in the details and let the art carry the personality.
Static HTML and CSS. Nothing to log into, nothing to update, nothing to break. It will still work in ten years, which matters for a body of work that has already been going for fifty.
We host it, maintain it and add new work as Dick sends it over.
Dick has an address now. One link that covers illustration, painting, prints and ceramics, and answers the question of what he does before anybody has to ask it.
It also does something a blog never could: it makes fifty years of restless, category-refusing work look like one career, because it is.
If any of this sounds like your situation, have a look at how we work, or get in touch.
