I don’t do it that often since I prefer to be mucking around with code, but sometimes I do graphic design as well. This is a card that I designed for Knockout Fitness, a local kickboxing and personal training and business run by Frank Scardamaglia. The backside of the card has scheduling info so that Frank can write his clients appointment right on the card. Maybe I’ll be making a website for Frank soon too…
This is a Wordpress site with a customized commercial theme from iThemes.com, here is what the theme looked like before. I was supplied with the logo and images and tweaked the theme to work with them, I also installed a contact form and rotating image gallery. Another great example of a cost-effective website for a small business!
This is another simple Joomla site I made a couple of months ago for Turbulence Sound Entertainment, a local DJ services company specializing in Salsa & Latin Top 40. The site layout was designed by my artsy partner in crime Lindsay and I did the slicing & coding. Nothing too complicated here, this is a good example of a ‘budget site’ for small businesses. Contact me if you need something simple for your small business that won’t break the bank!
Hannah Fitness
I created this site for Vancouver-based fitness instructor & personal trainer Hannah Fletcher completely from scratch, including the layout design. She needed a way to display her fitness class schedule for new and potential clients so I used the JEvents plugin for the Joomla content management system with some modifications to it’s layout. There is the main monthly calendar under the ‘Classes’ link, and then the list of upcoming classes in the sidebar so that you can take a quick look at what is coming up next. All the class names are linked to a more detailed description of what you can expect in the class.
Laurel Murphy
Laurel Murphy is a vocalist and singing teacher in Vancouver with an unusual approach to music: she improvises everything. No sheet music, no plan, she just starts singing and see where it takes her! What’s even more amazing is that she often does this with large groups of singers! Check out some of the audio and video on her site to hear her in action, it’s pretty amazing.
When Laurel came to me her website needed some re-organization and a facelift. This was the website before, follow the link below for the website now. Laurel came up with the design herself (she is a former graphic designer) and I built that into a template to run on top of Joomla. Laurel handles most of the updates herself now through Joomla’s easy to use page editor, I see she has added some new Youtube videos to the site recently!
For the BC Youth Week website I was charged with creating a new template for the website which was already running on the Joomla content management system, and a Flash intro to punch things up a little. For the new template and the intro they wanted the style to be a little less flat and a little more youth-oriented so I came up with the “Graffiti Style” theme that you see now.
It is not often that I get to work with beautiful and professional photography that did not come from a stock website, but working with Cereus Plantscaping owner Tamara McDonald I did get a rare opportunity to do that. Even more impressive is that she creates all of the plant art, and photographs herself it too! Talented woman!
Given that the photos are really gorgeous we wanted to have a very minimalist design to the website and just let the pictures speak for themselves. This website is not running on a content management system and the fanciest thing we have going is a lightbox popup for the images. Simple is beautiful, and it reflects the esthetic that Tamara takes in her plant work as well
Things are going full steam ahead with the new Two Nerdy Girls Design & Development Co. website, the server is getting set up this week so we should be live by the end of this week. In the meantime I thought I would post one of my recent projects so you can see what I’ve been up to lately.
One of my recent projects is an updated personal portfolio site for local Vancouver filmmaker and director Steve Rosenberg. His old website looked outdated and did not display his movie trailers in a way that was satisfactory for him. I gave the website layout a complete makeover and also learned a lot about how to embed videos for playback in a browser. It was a challenge, but I am very happy with the end result.
This is what I have been up to the past couple of weeks: a website for Gypsylou Designs. Very cool, handmade clothing from Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The owners/sisters Lindsay and Jennifer Hook started off just making the clothes for a hobby, but their success at the local summer market suggested that maybe they could turn it into more than a hobby! All of their garments are 100% hand sewn and printed right here in Canada, and the fabrics used are organic cottons.
Lindsay who does all the designs for the prints on the shirts sent me her design for the site and then I sliced it up and came up with the code to turn it into a template. This is another website that is utilizing the Joomla content management system, it’s a popular choice for the less ‘technically proficient’ small business owner as the backend is fairly easy to navigate and it comes with a built in article editor that allows you to update content without knowing any HTML or CSS at all.
I really like this site, the design that Lindsay came up with looks great and the clothes are wonderful too!
The redesign of Tantra Fitness’s website is a project that I have been working on for quite some time, as I started it while I was still working full time and I still don’t consider it ‘finished’ as there are features that I still want to add but that will take some time (an online booking system for stagettes/parties, for example).
The site before had a couple of issues that the client wanted to address, it can still be found here if you would like to compare. The studio’s owner Tammy Morris felt that the old site lacked some nice decorative and feminine graphics (since this is a womens only dance/fitness studio) and that it just didn’t match the look/brand of the Tantra Fitness studio anymore. The studio is painted in pinks and chocolate brown so I based the template on that.
I built the template for this site completely from scratch for the first time, which was a great learning experience, and used one of the many Photoshop brushes that I have found online with a burn effect to create the flower graphics. The girl on the right hand side was modified from a stock photograph in Illustrator and I used Joomla 1.5 as the content management system for this site. I also created the Flash intro on the landing page with photography of Tantra Fitness students by Karolina Turek.
As I said before it’s not 100% finished but I think (and I hope others do too!) that it is an improvement over the old site design and will continue to get better!
