Here is my rather long-winded answer:

This site was developed by an IT company lead by programmer Bryan Ross, who happened to hire the best graphic designer (Jim Milner) I've ever seen while we were struggling with some earlier designs that were not really up to par. (I've posted the version we were about to implement under my pics in my myspace page.) As soon as I was shown Jim's design work for http://fatal1ty.com/, this big video game tournament player guy, I gutted the entire Equilink.com design as it stood and told him to give it a shot. He asked my what I liked, design-wise, I said I was very big on white space thing and the next time I saw him, he had designed Equilink.com, pretty much as it now exists.

In the earlier version that's posted, (Under my pics on my home page.) the horse discipline icons were only going to switch colors when rolled over. We were going to put streaming video of people riding all the different disciplines at the top of the page.

With Jim's new design, the streaming video was completely eliminated. So, the new design was stunning, but utterly static.

Then it hit me that we could animate the horse discipline icons themselves. This was a tremendous amount of work for Jim Milner. It took him four months to animate each and every discipline. When he was done, we decided to take the static illustrations I had originally drawn, have them do a cross fade to Jim's animation when the horse was rolled over and then cross fade back to my static illustration when the rollover was done.

Bottom line, it took a long time to do and was very, very expensive. But, I love rolling over all the icons all at once and watching them move, particularly the grey and white version where the horses are reversed out.