Chaz had a few color palettes and specific font-types that he wanted me to pull from. After researching the varied styles of theses late 19th & early 20th century adverts, I began laying out the front and back of the business card and narrowing down the color choices.

Chaz also expressed a strong desire to incorporate ornamental flourishes — something I love to to do. Using existing ornamental vectors for a basis, I then began editing those ornaments and using the pieces to build more elaborate borders and corners,  exclusive to Chaz’s business card.

Finally, I narrowed down the color palletes to just a few prominent tones and chose their associations. The more elabroate typfaces, such as the one used for Chaz’s name, were hand painted too tone and with gradients to realy make them pop out.

Since typography is one of my favorite avenues of design, I am grateful for the opportunity to work on this piece. I thoroughly enjoyed designing this business card and am proud to have it as part of my portfolio.

Design of the ESTRELA website began with a number of pencil & paper sketches, resulting in two distinctive styles & layouts. The final design (shown left) focuses on the need for urban business and development to integrate with nature on both an aesthetic and globally beneficial level.

It’s sometimes difficult to design around an existing logo, especially where a specific look is desired, but I believe that the design and layout I have developed for ESTRELA Sustainability Consultants marries well to their established brand.

It has been a pleasure to work with both Robert Carlson and Linda Scarlett, and I am thankful for the opportunity to work with them, delivering an attractive, user-friendly, and eco-conscious web-presence.

I was first contacted by Orna through a company that I occasionally do freelance work for, Chipboard Creative. This would be the second health-oriented practice I have designed for. From day 1, my experience with Orna has been one of the best designer-client experiences I have had (they’ve all been exceptionally good) and I hope to work with her again should she have any future web or print design needs.

The logo, previously created by another designer, dictated the color scheme and heading elements of the site. One thing she knew she wanted early on in the process, was something a bit more ‘catchy’ for the title headings of the content area. After showing me some examples of sites with heading styles she liked, I had (what I like to think of as) a stroke of brilliance, and created the reduced-opacity salmon heading, tying in the logo with the content area, nicely.

Since this is a western Oregon-based practice (and because of the name of the practice), I felt it should have a very ‘Oregony’ feel, which meant greenery and fir trees — all of which I believe have been successfully accomplished, from the overall color and tone, the sloped treeline to the right of the header area, down to the post-footer’s semi-transparent treeline.

The navigation bar, is another one of my favorite sections of the site. A simple, right-floated, text-driven menu with drop-downs, and social networking icons and an internal search-bar to the left.

Each page has it’s own sub-header photo, all of which were taken by Dr. Izakson, herself. The photos are stunningly beautiful and add a richness to the site, keeping the design fresh with each page load.

I wanted to separate the sidebar from the content area with some kind of divider, but wasn’t content with completely separating it from the content, nor did I want to use a solid, 1 color border. I finally created a slight ’scored’ effect, giving the main wrapper a bit of depth and physical feel.

The sidebar was of particular focus in the latter stages of the design’s build. Sidebar content varies from one page to another, something I hadn’t really worked with before. This required a bit of research, but I finally located a plugin-in which allowed us to easily choose which sidebar items appear on what pages. The decision to do this stemmed from Orna’s desire to have the tag-cloud and blog categories on the blog page only, and not throughout the entire site.

The footer was kept relatively simple. I suggested adding her address and phone to the footer, filling it out a bit, as well as providing contact information, on each page of the site. Orna loved this idea, so I forged ahead, keeping contact info to the  right, copyright info to the left, and Taproot Web Hosting’s icon, center. Taproot is a company that Orna very much wanted to support and help promote. The final footer design shows a nice, clean and balanced layout that closes the bottom of the page, nicely.

While there were a number of revisions along the way, the final version remained fairly true to the original mock-up idea she had chosen from the 5 I presented to her — something that doesn’t always happen in the field of design.

Celilo Natural Health Center is built on WordPress for use as a CMS and as of this posting meets W3C validation requirements for XHTML and CSS. It is also compliant with all current, major browsers, as well as IE6 & 7.

I want to thank Orna once again for a lovely design experience. She became my ‘No. 1′ fan, and took it upon herself to promote my design services by word-of mouth — and continues to do so. For that, I cannot thank her enough! Orna, you rock!

As mentioned, Celilo Natural Health Center is hosted through Taproot Web Hosting, a local green hosting company  that I happily recommend using.

When FuR and I first began brainstorming how the site would look, she mentioned the possibility of incorporating a planet into the design, as her website is called Planet FuR Productions. I liked this idea, though at first I wasn’t sure how I would approach it. My first idea was to create a vector design, providing a more cartoonish & quirky look. After spending a few hours sketching out and and creating a mock-up in Illustrator, I just wasn’t feeling it, so I decided to rethink my approach.

For some reason National Geographic and Omni magazine came to mind, as I envisioned a more ‘realistic’ looking planet with a nebulous backdrop. Inspired, I began my new layout. I quickly ran into the problem of finding a planet that I could use. I didn’t like the idea of using stock art or an actual photograph of one of the local celestial bodies, so I attempted to make my own.

My first result was nothing short of unspectacular. Really. But my second approach resulted in pretty much what is seen here, just a bit more rough. FuR is fond of purple, and hoped to have the color in some part of the overall design. As highlights, link and borders, it didn’t quite have the spark either of us had hoped for, so we opted for the more burnt-sienna color for those elements. Still wanting to honor her desire, I adjusted the hue of some of the planetary layers to bring out just a touch of purple.

The planet image is actually a texture of sedimentary rock, which has been spherized (among other things). The galactic background is really a texture of fireworks against a black background, which, in my opinion, looks rather well as stars and star-clusters. I could have probably found a royalty free image of the actual galaxy, but I liked the idea of creating my own.

For a bit of variety, the About page has the planet in a state of solar eclipse, while the gallery pages have only the star backgrounds, with a reduced opacity to bring the gallery thumbnails forward.

This WordPress design uses the NextGen gallery plugin for the home page mini-gallery as well as the individual photo and glass galleries. It also includes a contact form and popular social networking icons.

Coding the design was a bit tricky with the mini-gallery on the front page, but went smoothly after that. The site is currently XHTML and CSS valid, as well as compliant with all major browsers. Included is a separate conditional stylesheet to display the site correctly in IE7.

Working with FuR Gebhardt was a fun and enjoyable experience and I look forward to working with her again in the future!

This time around I was asked to do a more minimalistic design, since a number of music artists had recently expressed wanting  less ‘designy’ template options, allowing more focus on their own up-loadable pictures (and understandably so!).

You can check out the home page here.

This template, called “Cogs”, allows the viewers focus to be drawn more to the artists pictures and info than the design itself. A large image holder below the navigation menu-bar is offered, as well as in the sidebar. I used KMFDM for mock-up purposes, but it should be noted that they are not actually part of the template design, and exist merely as an example of an artist’s complete site (also, KMFDM rocks, in case you were wondering).

A vector cog image was carried throughout the template (I’m particularly fond of the footer trio).  There is also a cog overlay in the sidebar image frame. The overlay is made to cover any image placed there by the artist. The internal pages continue pretty much how the home page is structured, with one notable exception, which is the Calendar page event backgrounds.

This design is geared for the Industrial/EBM/SynthPop artists. As you can see, there aren’t any excessive or flashy graphics at work here,  just clean, crisp, straightforward layout and elements.

With 3 header image options, this theme also comes in 4 colors and your choice of 2 layout variations (right and left justified).

The Men’s Resource Center & Women’s Counseling Center provide respectful, effective counseling services to individuals, couples and families striving for safe and healthy relationships.

The Design

I wanted to try a different approach with this design. In my experience, organizations such as this, along with other types of counseling centers tend to have websites that are very business-y, which is fine, but in some cases, the look is downright drab! I wanted to give a fresh face and appealing look to MRC’s website, as well as create a design that was representative of Portland, complete with an eco-friendly, home-grown look.

MRC needed a design and build that fit their budget, so with that in mind, I got started and provided them with two design options of  reasonable costs.

The first design (pictured top-left) was intended to use WordPress as it’s backbone, and was a bit more “flashy” using a lot of vector image elements. The second design (pictured right) had a similar feel, but was trimmed down, with minimal art and a simple layout.

One theme that is consistent with both designs, is the house. This is the building that the MRC’s Portland location operates from. It is a beautiful, Victorian-styled building on 14th St. and Sandy Blvd. A photo of the house was a prominent fixture of MRC’s original site and I wanted to carry that over into my designs. A photograph of the house didn’t fit well within the designs I had in mind, so I decided to build a vector version of the house in Illustrator, which is what you see in these two designs.

The version that was chosen was the more minimalist option, sans WordPress install, but with pure, valid HTML & CSS. The only change they requested was the color. They felt that the Dreamsicle orange was a bit too bright and cheery for their tastes, and asked for a more neutral color. I re-worked the scheme and presented them with an Earthy-blue version with pleasant green highlights. They were pleased with this new look and I was given the go-ahead to begin the build.

The only portions of the designs that were not mine, were the logos, which had already been established, so I did my best to incorporate them into my layouts by making some color adjustments.

If you haven’t caught the links throughout this post, you can find their site here: Men’s Resource Center & Women’s Counseling Center.

I am appreciative of the opportunity to work with MRC, and for the freedom of expression allowed to me while creating their online presence.

This project was a bit new for me – a UFO focused blog/news source, but I had some ideas churning around and was eager to get started. I felt it best to stay away from the typical sci-fi look, so there are no cheesy UFO images or alien faces in this design!

After a few very rough sketches, I opened up Adobe Illustrator and got to work. What I came up with was a stylized, yet unobtrusive theme that allowed for the reader to focus on the articles without being distracted by design elements. Two of the ways I achieved this was by using a light gray for the section outlines and a predominantly white background, while the headings and post-text were a significantly darker charcoal gray. This allowed the content to sort of ‘pop out’ at the reader .

The sidebar content layout was of particular focus. A lot of blogs (and I’m not going to name names) have so much going on in their sidebars that it makes navigating the site a bit of a headache. Without using a bunch of separating lines or background colors, I stuck to the use of padding, margins and colors to separate individual blocks.

This site was built on top of Blogger for use as a CMS. I have worked with Blogger in the past (see my Deirdre and the Sorrows design) and admittedly, its kind of a pain – mostly because unlike WordPress and other popular content management systems, Blogger uses it’s own propriety code. Because of this, Blooger blogs are not W3C compliant and do not validate. All Blogger sites suffer from this. That said, I managed to create a solid 3 column theme without running into any major bumps along the way. And in Blogger’s defense, it is a very good, banner-less, & free blogging and CMS service, allowing users complete customization.

You can find the blog here.

My design was featured in the October Hostbaby client newsletter!

Here is an excerpt:

NEW TEMPLATE: AXLE GREASE
We added a great new template this week with 20 variations. Chose the standard header with a rustic, train yard feel in a variety of colors – or replace the large header with an image of your own. You’ll find it in Style/Color/Theme in your Wizard control panel.

About

A few weeks ago I completed a design for Hostbaby.com.  Hostbaby is web hosting company for musicians who want to focus on their music and leave the design up to someone else!

Members are able to choose from a variety of templates that best suit their needs. Templates come in many variations, such as:  color,  design elements, and image placement options. It is an excellent service for the musician who wants a fresh, flashy, genre-relative design without taking time away from their music or shelling out their life savings for a quality site.

The Design

I had a few musical styles in mind when designing “Axle Grease”, a train-themed template: Western, Alt Country, Rockabilly, Bluegrass & Blues. Members are able to choose between a number of colors options & 4 design variations: A static header image (shown in picture),  a user-definable header image, an upright bass theme and an acoustic guitar theme. All variations  allow the member to choose a picture to fit the worn photograph section, located t the right of the post-body (pictured). The photograph edges remain static, while the image itself is changeable.

Designing for Hostbaby was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. A musician myself, I was able to approach the project as if I were designing for others with the same musical tastes as myself.

Examples of some of other variations will be available soon.

*I’ll be beginning a new template for Hostbaby in the next couple of weeks and I’ll be sure to post it here when it’s complete!

Country Girl Roundup is a site that I have been brainstorming on, over the last few months. My current vision sees it as a website for all women – Queer and Straight, to discuss Country-life. Whether it’s cooking, decorating, gardening, music, art – whichever. My temporary tag-line is “Country Living For the Self-Proclaimed Country Girl”.

The site will consist of a forum, occasional articles, photography & artwork, though the majority of the focus will be on discussion.

The Logo

I figure most people will “get” the logo. When I first began conceiving of the site, I imagined a group of cowgirls sitting around a campfire, telling stories & heating up food in a soup pot, so after a few stabs at campfire and cowgirl hat based designs, I decided to try one with a pot. I sketched out an idea, pulled it into Illustrator and finished it off. The result is the image you’re seeing to the left.

The font used for “Roundup” is a free font called Scriptina. I am not a fan of script fonts, in general, but when I saw Scriptina, I kind of wanted to kiss it. It also works well for a sort of “lasso” look.

SoCal Crawfish Connection is a new seafood restaurant located in Irvine California. The business, owned by the Tran family, was originally a coffee shop that has since morphed into a whole new venture in need of a fresh web presence.

The Site Design:

I was pretty much allowed free artistic rein with this site, while adhering to the clients’ need for a site that was simple, low-cost and easy to navigate.

There was a bit of back and forth on the font choices and placement for the restaurant title within the logo. One of the initial mock-ups had a stamped look that circled the Crawfish, but the clients had come across another seafood restaurant with a similar layout and wanted something a bit different. We finally decided on a font from the Helvetica family and a layout that kept the company’s title off to the side of the main logo design.

Additionally, the use of orange and blue tones really helped to balance the site while catching the eye of viewers.

The Logo Design:

The Crawfish logo was sketched out a number of times and the final design is true to my last sketch. The logo incorporates a subtle cartoon element that I feel gives it a unique, original look without making it appear childish.

I researched a large number of pictures of actual crawfish, and while the logo is not strictly anatomically correct, I tried to remain true to the more memorable charactersistics of the species.

Additional Work:

Outside of the logo and site, I also designed the company’s menu and their first double-sided advertisement/coupon card. The idea behind both was attractive simplicity with striking colors and a more elegant typography.

You can visit the website at www.socalcrawfishconnection.com. The menu can be viewd in PDF format here, and the coupon card here.