Petley-Hare Limited

World Crawl: Las Vegas

Vegas Crawl is run by an old colleague of mine, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to produce a new site for his business. This is the first site I’ve done that was designed primarily at 1200px, up from the typical 960px. And of course, it scales right down to 320px.

Tech Talk Africa

When I was approached to redesign Tech Talk Africa, I wasn’t overly enthused. There are a lot of ads, and a lot of content, which means design typically takes a back seat and there really isn’t much flexibility in terms of layout. But in the end, I’m quite happy with it, and had a lot of fun working on the mobile layouts. TTA is sporting a mobile first responsive design, and is “retina display ready”.

Simply Marlena

I’ve been working with Marlena for a few years now, primarily on her flagship site, Makeup Geek. Initially, she wanted to customize one of my themes, but I talked her into doing a brand new design, so I could make it responsive and fully cater to the visual style she was after. The end result, is this beautifully simple design that scales right down to mobile phone resolution, and sports 2x graphics for retina display devices, including the new iPad.

Rely on Horror

2012 will hence forth be known as the year of super fun projects! In February, I did a major redesign for a well established video game blog focusing on the survival horror genre. Having played several games in the genre, and being a long-time fan of the Resident Evil series, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to work on this site. It should feel very familiar to those who are fans of the genre.

Rich Spillberg

To say I had a lot of fun working on this site, would be an understatement of epic proportions. Rich came to me with a collection of excellent photos, a load of content, and enthusiasm for modern technology and best practices that rivalled my own. Essentially, a perfect foundation for creating something awesome. I knew right out of the gate that I was going to take a responsive approach here, and Rich was more than game. The end result is a site that scales beautifully across various screen shapes and sizes.

PictureCorrect

One of my personal favourites, PictureCorrect was the second large photography blog I redesigned in 2009. It was a challenge to come up with a style that was entirely different from Digital Photography School, considering much of the content is similar in nature. But the end result is something both my client and I were extremely pleased with. In January of 2012 I revisited this project and made the layout adaptive for mobile devices.

Stereokiller

Having spent my youth playing in punk rock bands, I was stoked to have the opportunity to work on a music community that focuses on independent bands in the hardcore, meta, and punk rock genres. Stereokiller is run by a lone developer, who came to me for help with the design. I did a full redesign of the site over the course of a few months, and provided HTML/CSS templates for each of the unique layouts.

Mead Family Dental

Dentist websites are a dime a dozen. Usually designed by a firm who ships customized templates; they’re typically quite dull and look out-dated. Alan Mead came to me because he didn’t want to have just another boring dental site. Initially launched in July ’11, I revisited Alan’s site in March ’12 to make the layout adaptive for mobile devices; tablets and phones.

Film Blather

It’s always fun taking an old site and giving it a fresh coat of paint. Film Blather was one of these projects, but it also received an overhaul of the back-end. Previously powered by a home-brewed database, Film Blather has been moved to WordPress and everything is managed from WP-Admin thanks to Custom Post Types and Taxonomies.

Girl With A Camera

To say I had a lot fun with this project, would be a massive understatement. This was my first venture into HTML5, and I took the opportunity to deck out Ashley’s photoblog with all sorts of CSS3 frills as well. One of the main challenges, was deciding on a colour scheme. Since each photo set could potentially have a dominent colour through-out, I came up with the idea of having the background colour change for each post (set). Along with the background colour, Ashley has the ability to adjust the size and positioning of the hero photo and thumbnails for each post, to provide an optimal viewing experience.

WP-Select

The latest edition to the Envato family, WP-Select is a “best of” selection of WordPress themes hand-picked by the editors of ThemeForest. My job, was to create a simple yet powerful tool that would allow users of all types to sift through and find exactly what they’re looking for. Powered by an incredible plugin developed by Iron to Iron, and sporting a front-end crafted by yours truly, WP-Select is an impressive piece of work, no matter how you look at it.

Makeup Geek

I couldn’t have been more thrilled when I was asked to redesign Makeup Geek. I love working with feminine colours, and given the quality of the content and massive following, it showed lots of potential. Working closely with Marlena, I executed a design that is feminine, bold, and sexy, without being too “girly” or cheesy. Since the initial launch, I’ve jumped back on board to help skin Makeup Geek’s third party store to match the rest of the site.

SpareBank 1 SMN Blogg

When I was asked to handle the design of a blog for a bank, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy. Corporate design is definitely not my specialty, and I was afraid I was going to be asked for a clean and minimal design, but thankfully that wasn’t the case. Tapping into current social media trends and presenting lots of content in an organized manner were top of the priority list, and I feel that we definitely achieved those goals. In the end, this project end up being one of the most enjoyable projects I worked on in 2010.

Tucker Max

Tucker Max is many things (yes, an asshole being one of them), but one thing is for sure – he is one busy dude. He has a lot going on, all the time, and needed a website where his fans and followers could keep tabs on it all. Previously, he had separate sites for his stories, his books, his movie, and so on. The main goal of this redesign, was to pull it all under one roof, give him the ability to manage content on his own, and maintain the style and attitude that is Tucker Max.

Digital Photography School

Redesigning Darren Rowse’s largest project was both exciting and terrifying. The site had out-grown its previous design, so there was lots of room for improvement, and plenty of new content to squeeze in as well. Dividing the site into prominent sections was also one of the main goals, which was achieved largely by focused colour scheme changes depending on the parent section of the content you’re viewing at the time. With a combined subscriber base of nearly half a million, I think it’s safe to say that DPS is the project in my portfolio which has had the most eyes laid on it.

Comic Book Resources

Without a doubt, the largest site I’ve worked on. CBR was initially launched in 2008, and has seen constant growth with new sections being added or overhauled regularly, which have mostly been handled personally. In May 2010 I revisited some of the global elements and gave the site a bit of a visual refresh, but the main style has remained in tact since its ’08 launch. So far in 2010, we’ve added an events calendar, and a comic books Twitter directory.