Latest work
about this project
The Royal Horticultural Society is the UK’s leading gardening charity furthering and providing horticultural knowledge and practice for all throughout its 200+ year history. The challenge is in realizing the optimal ways in which to utilize the web as a medium for delivering this wealth of knowledge.
I was tasked with redesigning the website from scratch. At the time it was a collection of content and applications spread across a CMS, flat html pages tied to Dreamweaver templates along with some classic ASP and .NET applications. All of these existed on the same domain without much in common as far as design. There were more than 12,000 pages but nobody was able to come up with an exact figure.
The website is required to meet a wide variety of needs for both clients and users. Bringing this all under a unified design within a single content management framework has been quite a challenge.
In essence my approach was to create as flexible a design as possible allowing for plenty of template variations while keeping a consistent sense of visual language throughout. I achieved this through a number of techniques including:
- A 12 column grid layout for the content area
- The use of master pages
- Readable, appropriate and consistent typography throughout
- A Blueprint-based CSS framework
- Consistent aspect ratio, size and optimization for all images
- Accessible, search engine optimized, semantic markup
- Rigorous cross-browser compatibility development and testing
I designed all of the templates in Photoshop & Illustrator then coded them by hand in XHTML & CSS. The flat html pages were then mapped to master pages and templates within our new content management system applying the rules and standards set out by the designs.
My most recent addition to the site is the fully reconstructed Shows & events area with a bespoke set of designs across the four flagship RHS flower shows. These will be expanded in both content and functionality as the actual dates draw nearer. We’re currently building user ratings and tag cloud functionality for the gardens and plants areas for each show.
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about these projects
Ihave designed many ad banners over the years in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. I regularly monitor the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s website in order to insure that my work complies with the latest standards. In terms of formats the MPU, leaderboard and skyscraper seem to dominate the landscape so these have been my focus of late.
Virtually all of the web advertising I work on now is Flash animation with a static image fallback. My approach is to create initial mockups in PhotoShop – taking care that the visual effects are achievable in Flash – then to provide a set of alternatives for approval by the client. Upon approval I recreate the mockups in Flash allowing me to animate them.
Keeping file sizes to appropriate limits is a crucial consideration in both design and animation.
Recent campaigns
- Croydon Park Hotel | Leaderboard & MPU
- Wild About Gardens | Leaderboard & MPU
- Walkers Bulbs | Leaderboard
- Bloms Bulbs | Leaderboard
about this project
This project was a complete redesign and front-end rebuild of the Warner Classics & Jazz website around an existing bespoke content management system.
The main aim of this project was to incorporate Warner’s Classical and Jazz & World music catalogues into one website in an elegant and logical way as part of a global re-brand for this division of Warner Music Group.
In order to keep a consistent visual language throughout I applied a 16 column grid to the main content area between the header and footer. I created 3 basic page templates with variations to accommodate the appearance of the catalogues both separately and together. The color based distinction was born out of their new branding as was the rounded, bubbly styling throughout.
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about this project
A fully content managed site designed and built from start to finish for the Romanian opera diva Angela Gheorghiu, this is the first project I’ve designed around the Python-based Django framework. This presented many new challenges and ultimately convinced me of the extensibility, elegance and efficiency of this platform.
The site was designed to look elegant, bring relevant content forward and to be as uncluttered as possible at all times. In subtle contrast to this was the requirement of laying out each page such that the majority of the content would be visible at a 1024 by 768 resolution. One of the more subtle challenges was to get the CD and DVD tracklisting to render dynamically in a neat, cross-platform, two column layout using Django templates, minimal xhtml markup and css.
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about this project
Event based projects often involve a fast turnaround. This site was briefed, designed, built, tested and launched in 5 days. As with all projects of this nature the key was to keep it simple.
The design echoes a brochure or magazine style and layout throughout using the album artwork as a basis for color and typography. The idea was to give the content and the user plenty of room to breath and move around in order to evoke a stately and luxurious feeling.
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about this project
This classical music label website was designed to help launch the revival of a 75 year old French imprint. Using the original label’s sparse, elegant white covers as a starting point I tried to introduce some modernity while keeping the original style intact. I used their distinctive logo as a motif throughout the site in several different sizes.
Although not driven by a full content management system this site uses a single formatted text file as a database for its entire recording catalogue that is dynamically rendered in php. This solution provides the client an easy alternative to html for updating the site regularly that is much more cost-effective than a content management system.
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about these projects
Because many people use email clients that are quite limited in terms of rendering capability, the process of creating html emails requires strict and outmoded methods that do not allow for most of our modern css wizardry. Many web designers bemoan these limitations but I see it as an opportunity to focus more heavily on fundamental design principles as these are essentially formatted emails without any functionality.
My goal is to make them as clear, lightweight and attractive as possible.