Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

Scenario Writing Studio was a redesign for an author/screenwriter with whom we’d worked before on True Story Ink.  There was a lot of content on her existing site, but it wasn’t managed very well, was not very search engine friendly, and was impossible for her to make even minor changes without having to get access to the code and use an FTP program.  What’s more, certain features she wanted to offer — like the ability to create an RSS feed for updates — would be impossible on the static site she had been given.  We’d proposed when we started working with her to redo the entire site in WordPress, and the launch of her new book and ghostwriting seminar was the perfect opportunity to do it.

Like True Story Ink, the site was to have a strong film noir feel, but it also needed to be obviously a site for an author.  The design we went with is really all about light and dark, and in that way, carries a strong film noir aesthetic.  One of the things the old site had was two sidebars that varied depending on what page you were looking at.  It was used to navigate sub-sections of pages, offer more information relevant to the current page, or give contact information.  For the redesign, we created a similar feature, building 15 pairs of sidebars for various pages, making them all widgetized (and therefore, fully customizable from the back-end), and all called from a single generic page template using a series of if statements (e.g. if this page, display this set of sidebars).

We designed customized graphics for her social networking links, and customized “enroll” PayPal buttons for her online classes to fit with the design of the site.  We wanted everything to fit with the mood of the site and Netflix’d Chinatown to give us some extra visual inspiration in the early development of the site design.

jazzsequence is my personal blog, so it’s one of those things that I tinker with constantly.  I loved the old theme i had up before, but there were things I wanted to do that i just couldn’t do with that design.  for one, it was very narrow — I wanted to be able to sell ad space if traffic picked up enough, so the new design would need preferably 260 pixels to accommodate standard, large square ads, and 125 pixel square smaller ads.  another requirement was pages — i had a lot of pages that just weren’t very visible in the old design which was more of a straightforward blog layout.  pages were relegated to a sidebar widget amongst a bunch of other sidebar widgets, and therefore hard to find.

but the other thing i wanted to do with the new design was to be able to integrate social media updates, different kinds of posts, and posts from different sources, and style them uniquely so you can tell they are different things.  in short, i wanted something that was a bit of a cross between a tumblog and a Facebook wall stream.

the updated design is grid-based.  regular posts are displayed, magazine-style, with thumbnails next to post excerpts.  i also have a class for “asides” where i post random thoughts that are too long for twitter, links, or videos, which are displayed in full, without the title.  posts from other sources are displayed with the title styled differently than posts from jazzsequence.com, and are given an icon to represent where they are from.  a similar method is used to style posts on the lifestream page.

the theme uses 3 different sidebars depending on where you are on the site.  this gives me the opportunity to hone the sidebar items to be somewhat more relevant to the content displayed on the page as well as make it possible to rotate the ad boxes on the sidebar.  pages display a list of related entries which is especially useful since most of the pages are part of a family of entries — fiction has a series of sub-pages for each piece, ditto for essays and music.  so from any page in a given tree, you can easily access other pages that might be related (this was borrowed from Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo theme).

I also designed a separate page template for the about page.  this page’s purpose is to give a bit of information about me and an easy place to display the various social networks that i have accounts on and/or use regularly.  I also split the content to give a definition of the name of the site.

i have a ton of content — I’ve been keeping a blog for about 7 years, and have had a non-blog website in one form or another since the mid- to late-90s, and there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to put on my site.  so I wanted to have a theme on the site that would be able to support that much content.  later I added in the dynamic content gallery — after putting that in the dirty creative site — as a way to feature my most popular and/or recent blog entries.  there’s so much content, from so many places, that I liked the idea of having a way to feature the longer-format posts on the front page, right at the top.

jazzsequence has been featured on DesignSnack and WeLoveWP.

www.jazzsequence.com

WordPress Plugins used: Dynamic Content Gallery, SimplePie, WP-O-Matic, Apture, Audio Player, IntenseDebate, Landing Sites, Upgrade Else DIE!, WP-sIFR, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, WPTouch iPhone Theme

iFotoGuide is an iPhone app that is developed by photographers, for photographers.  It’s a quick tour guide app that tells you where to go to shoot the best locations, when to go, and how strenuous the hike is to get there.  It’s actually a series of apps, with each installment focusing on a different National Park.

Our job was to redesign the existing website for iFotoGuide, which was very basic and didn’t compliment the technology as well as it could have.  In addition, they had maintained a WordPress.com blog for iFotoGuide which was starting to get some real attention.  The idea was to bring these two disparate sites together, integrate the blog into the main iFotoGuide website and make the website sleek and awesome.

We took the same approach to the design that we would take for a standard photography site — using dark, matte colors to serve as the background and allow the photography and typography to really stand out in contrast.  We wanted the home page to be really simple and straightforward — a lot like the original site that just had a link to the app in the iTunes App Store and a brief description — so that you could look up the site quickly from a review or a mention somewhere, and get everything you needed right on the front page.  We designed the front page to be modular, with 4 user-editable widgets with room for text, a newsletter opt-in, a link to the app in the store, and whatever else they would want to feature.

We imported all the content from the WordPress.com blog into the ifotoguide.com blog, and gave the blog page a standard blog layout with our social bookmarking links for easy sharing.  We’re really pleased with the design and feel that while the design definitely suits and fits with the technology, it’s really more about taking great pictures.

www.ifotoguide.com