This week has seen the launch of my latest freelance project, working with Josh Wynter, a talented composer from Bristol.
Josh wanted a portfolio site to showcase a wide variety of media including; audio, video, photos and a news feed. He also wanted to manage the site using wordpress and for all of the content to be navigable without any page refreshes.
This was the first time I had worked with the new wordpress 3.0 release and it was a great opportunity to make use of the new custom post types. I personally think this is one of the best sites I have ever built and enjoyed every minute of it, Thanks Josh.
Josh’s website: http://joshwynter.co.uk
All the cool kids are dribbling, why can’t I?
I haven’t felt this left out since my mum refused to buy me proper Nike trainers at school. Dribbbling is a new phenomenom all about sharing what you are working on and getting encouraging, inspiring and constructive feedback from other designers.
I think it is a fantastic idea and I love the execution of it, the site is simply stunning. Unfortunately dribbble is still an invite only proposition which is a bit whack if you are not friends of friends of the creators or an internationally renowned design super hero.
Whilst I am still unable to dribbble in public I thought I would dribbble in private and put out a blog post with the shots I would be dribbbling if I could.
These shots are both from projects I am currently working on and any dribbble-esque feedback on either would be much appreciated.
A current client project
An ongoing personal project
PS - If anyone out there has a spare dribbble invite they could send my way I’d be as happy as a kid with proper Nike trainers.
UPDATE: I now have my very own Nike trainers thanks to the lovely Matt Carey!
Last night I came across a new post on stuff and nonsense entitled Could you be a dick? in which Andy Clarke challenges the world to come up with a spoof business card for a private investigator.
I was rather amused by this proposition and set to work on my own idea which has now been uploaded to the Hardboiled card flickr group. The nine best entries (as judged by Mr Clarke himself) will go on to feature in the pages of his forthcoming book “Hardboiled web design” to assist in the explanation of CSS3 selectors.
Last night whilst catching up with twitter I saw the following tweet from Remy Sharp…
Snap Bird is essentially an enhanced twitter search application that Remy has built to find archived tweets which are more than seven days old. I liked the idea and also liked the name ‘Snap Bird’ and I then began to wonder what a snap bird might look like if it where real creature. Before I knew it, this day dreaming had spawned an impromptu design session and moments later I’d cracked out Fireworks and had begun creating an illustration of a snap bird.
From this simple character I continued to develop a logo/brand and before too long I had created an entire layout for the Snap Bird home page.
I was quite pleased with how this design had turned out and decided to email Remy a link to the design to see if he was interested in using it to replace the largely unstyled version that he currently has up. As yet I have had no reply, although judging by further tweets from Remy today, it seems that he has already begun work on his own design.
I look forward to seeing what he produces.
EDIT: Find out what happened in this follow up blog post
I was recently asked to help out designing a website for a new online marketing consultancy called Firehorse Digital. The original brief asked for a template design with a left column for navigation, a central column for content and a right column for additional information. The company already had a logo but wanted this expanding into a fiery brand for the website template.
The image below accompanied the brief in order to better reinforce their vision.
At first I came up with two designs. The first featured a lot of red and orange and had a left aligned navigation which joined the currently selected page to the main content with a white highlight. The second had a lot more white space and used a right aligned navigation with a subtle color change to show the current page. In this design I also lifted the right hand column off the page with a background colour and a bottom shadow.
In both designs I decided to remove the background colour and surrounding box from the logo and make it white. I felt that this made the logo look more modern and stand out better in the fiery colour scheme. To reinforce the brand further I also used the horse’s head element of the logo in a decorative manner. In the first design it features as a semitransparent watermark on the header and in the second it is used as a footer image in the right hand column.
Feedback from Firehorse was positive and a third design was requested combining their favourite elements from designs one and two. Concept three was based on concept two with the following alterations.
- The horse’s head watermark from concept one was added to the header.
- The navigation was left aligned and the current page was given a more prominent highlight to give a stronger visual tie to the main content
- The left column was given a pale grey background to match the right column. This colour change was needed in order for the navigation highlight to work.
Concept three was nearly there but Firehorse was sad to have lost the fieriness of concept one and was also worried about the amount of vertical space above the main content. For concept four I removed the dark borders on the header and footer and reduced the padding around the central content to ensure that more text could be seen above the fold. I also reintroduced the orangey-red gradient from concept one.
The Firehorse Digital website is currently being built and will hopefully be going live in the near future.
I would like to give a special mention to Regolare a fantastic Italian photographer whose photo many directions where to go I borrowed to use as an example image whilst mocking up the Firehorse designs.
