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.

This retro sepia tone blog was such a fun project to work on! The three column layout includes a specially coded “About Me” column with a picture of the blogger and all the most important information about her work as well as a more standard sidebar column and a main content column. We were given the great photo used in the header and asked to design something with a vintage feel that would appeal to writers. So we took our leads from the picture and used warm browns and creams and added some fun textures and fonts to give the blog personality. The ornaments separating different posts and sections give the design a little extra retro elegance.

Our favorite part of this site is the way all the individual elements work together to bring a warm, friendly and intriguing visual mood to the site.

Customer feedback: Arcane Palette did an excellent job designing and developing a customized WordPress Theme. They handled all the technological aspects for me so I could focus on what I do best – running my business – and created an impressive design that matches perfectly with my needs. Throughout the process they were professional, responsive, communicative, and timely. The team at Arcane Palette is a rare and wonderful find. I highly recommend their services.