In the past two years many of the Web sites launched by the Lubavitch News Service have been marked by the unique and elegant style of graphic artist Yael Haneman. Besides her design for the Chabadonline.com megasite, which includes thousands of Lubavitch facilities worldwide, Ms. Haneman has given shape and color to highly successful holiday sites, such as Chanukah, Purim, Shavuot and last year's High Holidays site.

She also designed the successful Kehot Online Web site. Modeled after large commercial booksellers, Kehot Online has proven to be an effective dissemination tool for Lubavitch's publishing arm. This success is due, in no small measure, to Yael Haneman's clean and pleasant design style.

We caught her last week on vacation in her birthplace, Israel, where she's staying with family in the town of Hertzlia, just north of Tel Aviv. This is her first summer "completely out of school," as she puts it. After majoring in Media and Photography at the Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, she's completed her post-graduate studies in Telecommunications and Computer art at New York's prestigious School of Visual arts. Still, while taking a break from her other professional engagements, Yael is fast laboring on the upcoming High Holiday site for Chabad-Lubavitch - for two reasons:

"First, the Chabad sites have become more pleasure than work," she explains with a smile, "and second - the site must be done by mid-September, or else..."

On a more serious note, Haneman says that working on Chabad's holiday sites "Renewed my connection to the cycle of the Jewish year. The idea of looking for the visual significance of each holiday has been very exciting."

One of the great changes in this year's High Holidays site, dealing with the period starting the week before Rosh Hashanah and ending on Simchat Torah, is the editorial choice to adopt a portal-style presentation.

"We had to find a way to package the unbelievably large amount of content available," confides Haneman. Her job now is to make sure the Tishrei portal will not lose any of the visual strengths of her previous works.

"The color of the high holidays was very important to me," she says. "The challenge is, of course, making this very complex site user-friendly and visually pleasing to every type of visitor."

We're all looking forward to seeing her work, in three weeks, give or take a day...