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 (now Nonfiction 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 access 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 additional information relevant to the current page, or provide 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 additional visual inspiration in the early development of the site design.

designed by erin
www.scenariowritingstudio.com

She eased back in her chair and took a pull on her cigarette. For having just told her that he suspected his wife was murdered, this John didn’t look too concerned. “Alright,” she cooed, “I’ll take the case. My fees are pricey, but you can afford it. I’ll need you to start by telling me where you were on the night of your wife’s death…”

We’ve been working on some projects recently with a film noir feel, so have been doing quite a bit of visual research on the style. This wallpaper is inspired by classic and neo-noir films like Chinatown with a bit of a twist; rather than the typical, square jawed, male PI starring, I wanted to play with the idea of the classic film noir archetypes with a female lead instead.  We have a film noir wallpaper already, but this one is more about the look and aesthetics of the films rather than the 1940s and ’50s posters.

As always, we have widescreen and standard versions available and we’ve included an iphone version as well.  This wallpaper is calendar-only, and the zip file contains versions in the following sizes:

standard
1024×768
1280×960
1600×1200

widescreen
1440×900
1920×1200

iphone
320×480

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