This new version has been many months in the working. With less than a year to the hike, it is my great pleasure to present to you an entirely new face for Full Circle.

The overall design and conception of the new website came unexpectedly. I had already been working on a new version of the website which was in many ways similiar to the old, and the lackluster appearance and performance saddened me. It just didn't feel vibrant, dynamic or intuitive enough. Disheartened, I visited Mike and Kate one day and followed them to the Audubon Center of the North Woods, a place I enjoy especially deep and fond memories of from teenage years. As the sun rose and set, I took walks along the shoreline and mulled over a number of important topics. We all need time-outs to do things like that, think about our positions in life and the paths that brought us to where we are. As my thoughts drifted to the future, the website intruded, and just sat there cruelly. I knew I had to reinvent it, but there was a designer's block of some kind in my mind.

Lakes do miracles for people. These placid bodies of water - and I won't even go into the science, utility and importance of them, that's the job of Mike and Kate and others on the team - reflect the earth and sky, yet have an almost surreal deepness and movement in them. And the colour. It was almost like a zen revelation I'm sure many people have had sometime in their lives: As I gazed into the lake, the lake began to erase previous conceptions and barriers to creativity. My head emptied itself, and inspiration came.

Janine Benyus intoned that what's important is not how we can use nature, but what we can learn from it.
Now, looking back, I can talk about what transpired, and what I learnt.

Colour.
We start with straight web-design talk. The old website was a pastel blue. For exceptional designers who also happen to be artists, that would suffice for such a website, maybe even out of minimalist white, but I just happened to be the kind of person who works best with darker colours, and I couldn't even draw a wheel. The colour of the lake at dawn's twilight, out on a little pier, wasn't the light hue of a midday sky. It was a deep blue, with a hint of green and a hint of depth. Little furls, waves and eddies tucked in and out of existence, almost like ghostly apparitions, giving the deepness a kind of flowing texture of darker and lighter. I could spend hours transfixed by the water. I repainted the background of the website with a colour that doesn't come close to what I saw, but was the best match I could pseudo-randomly select from the palette.

Shape.
I know, water has no shape. Okay, maybe it takes the shape of the lake it's in. But my thought process went on a little hiatus, claiming creative license. It does seem kind of like glass in its special transparency, molten glass, ready to turn into sharp, clean, mathematically perfect crystalline shapes that could almost resonate if you imagine tapping one with a claw. The main menu of the website had been a major stumbling block. It was horizontal on version one, horizontal with drop-downs on version two, and version three was kind of vertical, like a sidebar for the header graphic. All flat, cubiodal shapes. In a sharp break from tradition, I had to do the next best thing to carving the menu out of glass.
That brought me to another concept - that the previous design had borders. The whole page had some sort of frame that bordered gave it some kind of minimal artistic merit. I realized, cliché as it sounds, that I was trapped in a box. The water in a lake is free to flow. It has no boundaries; if it needed to flow somewhere, it courses past obstructions, tops levees, and carves the gentlest of curves in the hardest of rocks. It laps on a shoreline, fading into land; reflects a sunrise, fading into sky.

Texture.
Even a completely placid lake has little motions somewhere. It's not flat, even if the surface is. Beneath the surface, things are moving, slowly, from place to place, or in inordinate random directions, and the movements, the little stirring a slight breeze adds in, or the ripples that wander outwards from the multitude of tiny insect inhabitants, add texture to it.

Organization.
A lake is a beauty, a myriad of intricately interwoven movements and forms. To study or categorize it, you could break it up into n dimensions and organic groupings, and they are so deeply interwoven. On the scientific team, we have geologists, hydrologists, biologists, and all sorts of other -ists and -ers, all with unique perspectives and interdisciplinary connectedness. The wonderful thing is they are all brought together, somehow, by a lake. A website that seeks to reflect the lake should be as organic. Instead of going "oh, here's a bunch of links to other websites, and here's a section full of arbitrary uncategorized articles, and then on this side here we have the sponsors..." it had to become interwoven, links from page to page within pages, like wikipedia, something people don't mind losing themselves in, like the way I got lost gazing into a lake; Although I had to do some kind of top-level navigation because I'm not that amazing a programmer+designer+writer as to build a completely organic website from scratch, in such a short period of time.

Resourcefulness.
Lakes are part of the arcane processes encircling Earth that recycles everything, sooner or later. As a sum of parts, it takes what is given to it and puts it to best use eventually. Craig Blacklock, a truly inspirational and professional photographer, has been sharing the beauty of Lake Superior's North Shore for more years than I can count on both hands. I even have a print straight from his workshop-gallery framed on my wall. He contributed several photographs in high-resolution to the design of the website, but none of them were used on the old website for some reason. Now, panel #, titled, from his book The North Shore graces the head of the website. Words fail me when I try to describe it, the little feelings stirred by it and the timeless beauty of the moment. It completes Full Circle.

Change.
A lake is a lake is a lake. But what's in and of the lake? The physical boundaries waxe and wane over time, the level rises and falls, human development around the lake turns something into nothing and nothing into something. Water freezes and ice thaws and vapour rises into the yonder. Communities of nature from land, water, sky and in-between intermingle and interact and evolve. Sometimes in big ways, when it has to.
I had to let the old website go, despite having spent a year, on-and-off, working on it. I remember when I first jumped onto the project. It's almost exactly a year ago to the day I'm making this announcement, when I met Mike and we registered a website and server and began to craft out our niche on the web. It was based, originally, on Joomla, and I only discovered what the programming language "PHP" was 6 months prior. Now I'm dumping that generation, coding and designing this incarnation from scratch with what I've learnt from a lake, and other places.
It is new, and it is better, but things always change. New additions come along, and the site has yet to be filled with the content and activity that would come with the start of the journey. Maybe the best is yet to be.

I have to thank everyone who have been putting up with the old, clunky version of the website while I languished, got inspired, and worked on this one. This is especially to Mike and Kate, who this website is dedicated to. They're the ones who first showed me the beauty of Lake Superior. I still remember the moment in perfect clarity, the glimmering open expanse appearing over the hill as we drove in a van towards Duluth on Mike's wondrous Wolf Ecology course. A kind of love for wolves brought me to the Audubon Center and the course at first. Could I say I fell in love with the Minnesota and Lake Superior then?