A fenced-out view of a row of skyscrapers, masked from the lines of a bar code symbol.
The sign poking over the fence reads, with typical New York City abrasiveness: “Don’t even think of stopping here.”
The site prompts us to roll the mouse over Noel’s outgoing ad message. We click through into Noel’s landscape representation of the New York City skyline, as it crawls horizontally across the monitor screen. perhaps another day in the life of a cabbie.
Here, we enter Noel’s world…A photo gallery. Noel’s family from home…even some of his New York snapshots, including the worst pictures of the Statue of Liberty ever.
His resume. (Do you think any viewers knew Noel’s first job was designing signs for a copy center in Boston? Or that his favorite kind of music was 70’s soul and acid jazz?)
We gain admittance to yet another of Noel’s student web activities…a button at the bottom of his resume points a hyperlink to the beginnings of a… future business concept? CraneFaces is the place for Noel’s personal designs, with typographic line showings and type specimens.
A typographic poem…the beginnings of a portfolio. Beginnings to an evolving guide to NYC for freshmen and tourists… These, in keeping with Noel’s onscreen sense of wit, and charm, connect us even further to Noel and his tastes by creating a background.
One week later, it was in front of the television audiences again, as though to confirm the ghost-URL for those who only thought they half-heard the line due to the interference of election night coverage a week previously. On November 10th, Noel found himself explaining it to Felicity; this time in an act of overt self-justification, as she enters his dorm-room seeking advice:1
Felicity: Are you busy?
Noel: Just working on my page.
Felicity: Your what?
Noel: My webpage. Noelcrane.com
Felicity: Why do you have a webpage?
Noel: Why does anyone have a web page? Too much free time, not enough friends, justifying owning a computer…
Before he knew it, Noel was upgrading his old Macintosh IICi for a Bondi Blue iMac, Felicity’s own words still resonating, “Wow…Noelcrane.com hit the big time!”2
1 Felicity F706 “Drawing the line” by J.J. Abrams.
2 Felicity F710 “Gimme An O” by Jennifer Levin.