Of all the websites that I have created this remains one of my favourites. It was a refreshing project because for once I had all the content for the site before I actually started designing, a rare luxury in this industry. The main idea behind the site was that all the content would be written on the back of a seaside postcard. I thought that this would give the site a relaxed feeling and provoke site users to make a positive association between the site and their previous holidays.
The illustrations for the site where created using Fireworks CS3 on the mac. To create the gradient colour scheme for the background I used a colour picker to carefully select swatches from a photo of an idyllic desert island beach which i found on flickr. The swirly font used for the site is Giddyup Std and it is implemented using a combination of background images and sifr.
The handwriting style font along, the crimped, stamp-like edges for photos and the homemade Noss Mayo postmark all help to reinforce the postcard themes that I wanted to get across. These same themes where also used to create some double sided postcard layouts for The Wheelhouse to use as oversized business cards/flyers (see below).
Following it’s release the website was featured on numerous CSS galleries and was later included in Vandelay Design’s
25+ Inspiring Designs by Land, Sea & Air blog article and psd.tuts+ Inspiration: Water and Ice blog. It is always nice to find out that your work is appreciated.
Working on the Yell.com google gadget was an enjoyable experience. I knew very little about the google gadget API before I started and this made the process all the more rewarding.
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Noelle Schrieber is an artist who specialises in fine art, painting and photography. She came to me in 2007 wanting a new website on which to exhibit her portfolio. My main aim whilst developing during this project was to make her art the focus of the site. For this reason the homepage and many of the other primary pages in the site consist simply of a gallery of images. For this same reason the colour palette used throughout the site is very neutral so as not to detract from the bold imagery in the paintings and photos.
This website is special for me because it was the first time that I had ever had a go at creating a CMS. Although relatively basic the custom PHP CMS enabled Noelle to login to her website, upload new paintings and enter the details about them. She could then remove/edit existing paintings and re-order the galleries using drag and drop. This was valuable for me as I learned a great deal about PHP and MySQL in the process.
Richard Pryn is a talented media composer based in Swindon who has worked with the likes of Ikea, Evian and Nokia. Richard came to me wanting a website to showcase his portfolio of compositions as well as a showreel of his television and film soundtracks. Due to the large volume of rich media content on the site I decided to build the project in flash and actionscript.
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Stompfrog is the name of my portfolio website. It was originally launched in August 2007 and has remained largely unchanged since then. The entire website consists of one page. The main sections of the site can be navigated using the global navigation on the left. The new content for each section of the site then slides in vertically using javascript. Sections of the site which have multiple pages of content can then be navigated through at a secondary level using horizontal animations. The css and javascript to achieve this effect was written by myself and utilises the jsTween library for the animations.
Following it’s launch stompfrog.co.uk was featured on several css galleries including CSS Vault, One Page Love, CSS Clip, Screenalicious, Design Float, Most Inspired, and CSS Walk. More recently Stompfrog was also featured on One Page Love, a brilliant niche gallery dedicated to one page websites.
Due to the nature of these sites I was receiving a lot of traffic from web designers and it wasn’t long before stompfrog rip-offs started popping up. These where easy to find because the code thiefs didn’t have the intelligence to remove my google analytics tracking code!
Several months after the launch of Stompfrog I was contacted by Tim Alper, a journalist who was working for the Korean IT Times. Tim was writing an article entitled “Design At Any Cost?” which was about the importance of design in modern websites and other products.
Tim’s double page article combines some of my own thoughts (sent via an email interview) with those of Park Jung-Yeon a Korean market researcher. As well as it’s online presence the Korean IT Times is also in printed circulation. Many thanks to Tim for sending me a copy via airmail, it is much appreciated.
