Somehow, it’s fitting that I inaugurate this design revamp and the new blog on…
…St. Patrick’s day!
So I hereby dedicate this blog to web development, graphic design, fine art and some down and dirty practical css theorycrafting, all in the name of a good Irish Porter.
No really! Go get yourself a cold one! I’ll wait. *wink*
The Keepers of Stromgarde’s site went through several iterations, on multiple versions of phpbb and the CMS MX-Publisher. I was responsible for two of them, from initial concept through custom theme and maintenance. I also created the guild’s logo.
The first screenshot below is actually the more intricate of the two versions. The parchment boxes are designed to be flexible, using multiple graphics in nesting backgrounds (this was before CSS progressed to the point where you could have multiple graphics in the same background, but uses the same principle). I created all the graphics from scratch using only programs that were available freely online (mainly gimp) as this was before I had my own copy of Photoshop.
Unlike most of the sites I’ve posted here, I did not do the final code implementation on this site, nor the banner ads associated with it. Parts of the current implementation are different from my original design, particularly in the navigation treatment. However, they retained 99% of the design elements I created and I’m happy with how the design turned out overall. The screenshot above is from my initial mockup rather than the final site.
In addition to the basic site design, I created the two main logos visible in the screenshot above (at the top and bottom of the site).
Summer Snow Art is a retailer of art prints with custom framing. They needed an ecommerce solution, so I built this expandable liquid design around an osCommerce base. Additionally, I coded in a frame-changer via javascript that would allow people to preview the prints with frames around them.
The site has been redesigned since then but you can still see the old design in action at http://web.archive.org/web/20070823071340/http://www.summersnowart.com/
Resume designs should have personality, but the design should never get in the way of telling the person’s story. For Paul, I knew that I needed something typographically simple that could get across the practical and efficient side of his work, but that was a little playful and conveyed just how vibrant he is as a person. This particular shade of red, as a background, I chose because it’s solid and very active, but not so blindingly red that it detracts from the most important part of the page: the text. For the font I used the most basic Arial/Helvetica/san-serif font stack, and stuck to a single font stack throughout the page (except the header graphic). This generates an attractive screen-viewed page that focuses on Paul’s work experience without being boring (because Paul is anything but boring), and leaves a clean, minimalist print version.
