Creative Brief: Design and build a portfolio website for a video production and online distribution strategy company.
Getting the production site up and running took a little longer than I predicted due to a late-in-the-game design decision, but I’m much happier with where it wound up than I would have been.
The center-piece of the site, the portfolio slider on the front page, uses the Page Thumbnail functionality of WordPress 2.9 to make it ridiculously easy to add new items. This is unlike the slider on my front page, which is hand-crafted in Coda because I don’t want the XHTML section of my brain to atrophy.
Since there is a secondary slider on the portfolio pages, I set the thumbnail sizes in WordPress to generate the appropriate sizes so that each image only had to be uploaded one time in one place to put the correct images in both places.
The Road Not Taken
The first iterations of the design were very dark, brooding almost. Paul Lucci, my partner in crime over at Crooked Gremlins, was brought on to do the illustration work and to help with the logo. The first ideas we had matched the attitude of the site, which was way too serious.
The Metal Goddess, indicating strength
The game-board, indicating strategy
Ultimately, the client wanted a more light-hearted look, which we pulled off with a lighter color palette and brighter imagery in the slider.
The Services Section
One of the last pieces of the site to come together was the Services section. I’m still kind of amazed how it only takes one or two ideas to make a thing that seemed totally broken and unapproachable a nice thing to look at.
Paul provided the illustrations here, as well.
