Justin Skolnick lives and works in Chicago.

CVEA

The Cedar Valley Entertainment Authority

2002

An alt-weekly concieved after the fashion of the Village Voice and City Pages, the short-lived Cedar Valley Entertainment Authority extended to the arts and entertainment scene of Iowa’s Cedar River Valley — from Mason City down to Cedar Rapids — an image of itself. It was not that the area lacked a creative community, but that the community hardly knew its own vibrant extent. So much the founders surmised. And ergo: the CVEA.

I was invited to design the site, the sole direction being something contemporary, maybe along the lines of Raygun. What I returned was a pastiche of photographic fragments culled from the area’s cultural landmarks. Kid A and Amnesiac were current when I set the CVEA logo in Plakatbau, the freeware typeface employed to pitch-perfect effect on both albums’ covers, with loose-tracked Officina Sans and lovingly abused Hoefler Text rounding out the graphic type treatments. It was near the cutting edge at the time, and for that reason perhaps a tad too far beyond convention for the audience.

Notable, but lost forever, is the content management system I cobbled together in classic ASP and MS Access — on an offline iMac in a text editor, no less. It was a glorious hack-job, made entirely of copied code, memory, and faith. And I got the bloody thing to work.