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
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.
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.