Turn It Off And Go To Bed
Websites. Professionally designed and built.
Gnu Stationery
... is a set of lovely, designery notebooks for arty, designery people (or just those with a love of sexy notebooks).
Great job - very creative with a wide-open brief. I did all the front-end for this as they have their own CMS in-house.
The Gourmet Group
... is a corporate 'umbrella' brand, pulling together the home gourmet, the events gourmet and the corporate gourmet. This is a single-page site which is an approach I really like to take as it's great a discipline in thinking super-simple and really focussing on the importance of simple, effective design and content.
The Home Gourmet
... is a visiting-posh-chef service, the idea being that you can have fancy food served up in the comfort of your own home. They do parties, dinners, corporate schmoozing, baking and lots more.
I first did this site a couple of years back and the founder, Josh, called on me to develop the branding further and extend the site with extra content. This turned into a major overhaul and a really nice brand development challenge namely, to develop a visual identity for the three strands of the business: the home gourmet, the events gourmet and the corporate gourmet under the new umbrella brand of The Gourmet Group. The key challenge being to create branding for each of the sites that would be distinct, but work as a 'set' (...and take that through into a new stationery package).
The Events Gourmet
... is, as the name suggests, a gourmet catering company that does... events.
This is the second of the three Gourmet Group strands that I branded (see above).
The Corporate Gourmet
... I've included this to complete the set as doing so demonstrates how the logos work together, (the main point of the exercise really).
Virtual Lab
... is a public science project from The Medical Research Council, for G.C.S.E. up to 'A' Level students. The idea is that the site presents results in the form of annotated photos of petri dishes and things, which users can study before 'scoring', based on what they can see in the photos and comparing it to the experiment brief. Users' input is then sent back to the lab and contributes to the overall analysis of the experiment. A collaborative, 'virtual' laboratory.
The stuff on the site is all taken from real experiments carried out behind the scenes by real scientists (presumably wearing real white coats and goggles), which is intended to make participants feel they're involved in something real and therefore more valuable and relevant to their studies.
The Guild of Master Craftsmen
... is the UK's biggest and best-known trade association, representing crafts and tradespeople in every practice from glass-restoring to wooden mosaic-ing to all sorts of other stuff.
This was a complete redesign for their main site, divided into three 'views' for their three main audiences, consumer, trade and members.
The Guild have quite a lot of content on their site, almost all of which they wanted to keep so this meant creating a 'skin' into which their content could be put, without creating too much havoc with the information architecture.
I completely redesigned the site and navigation, creating less of an 'archive' feel and introducing more dynamic, content-driven elements, especially in the members' section.
The key part of the brief was to 'clean up' all the layouts and provide a set of coherent and re-usable templates for future updates.
Pooh's Nursery School - Best In Class, Interactive Media Awards 2010
... is a lovely nursery school who needed a lovely new website.
We started at the very beginning with Pooh's giving me some colour ideas and a very open brief. So, away I went and I brought back a smashing new site with a gallery that they can add their own photos to and a news section to publish their own news.
I used lots of children's daubs and scribbles in the background but I kept the main layout area really clean and professional so it didn't look too 'themed' and wacky. www.poohsnurseryschool.co.uk
Pooh's won Best in Class from The Interactive Media Awards, 2010
Ammonite Press
... is a book publisher in Lewes, East Sussex.
They produce appealing, coffee-table / browsing-type-books of old photos from the Press Association archives. They also produce technical guides for posh cameras.
The site is a complete redesign, intended to present the catalogue nicely and give the company a strong visual identity too.
Base
... is a property developer. They design, rebuild and refit a vast range of commercial and residential properties. Some of their work is very impressive and their interiors are sleek and modern. The site establishes the new brand identity that I developed for them. This was broadened out into a new set of stationery, van signage, postcard set etc.
Again, indispensible assistance from the excellent Ozay Olkan who did the back-end in MySQL/Flex.
Ski Base
... is a brand new luxury, 5-star boutique ski chalet in Val d'Isere. This website is a showcase for the chalet and all its opulent, luxurious charms. The project invloved developing the brand identity to take it to a higher level of prestige, leading to an entirely new dynamic site with full cms in Flex, programmed by my excellent friend and colleague Ozay Olkan.
Riad Lahboul
... is a guest house in Meknes, Morocco.
It's been lovingly restored in keeping with its heritage. Right on the edge of the medina, in the midst of camels, snake-charmers and medicine-men, it's a pretty amazing place to stay in a pretty amazing country. The Riad Lahboul site uses a simple but flexible page format to provide a set of really straightforward webpages that are easy to navigate and you're guaranteed not to get lost, confused or hacked off.
The site is multi-lingual with a simple Content Management System. I did all the PHP & MySQL on this one as a way of developing my programming skills a bit. It almost drove me nuts, but I learned a lot.
Scopic
... is the website of a public science project by the Medical Research Council. The idea is to present science in an interesting and creative way to engage the imagintaion of school-age children.
The project involved creating a Flash game and a website. You can download the game from the site. It was voiced by Patrick Moore.
I did all the design, logo, CD cover, website, game interface, the lot. My excellent friend Oz did the Flash programming for the game.
Rae Music
... specialises in arranging live music for occasions like weddings and corporate functions.
They have a small rosta professional musicians - singers, pianists, harpists - that sort of thing.
We decided to do a really simple, single-page site very closely matched to their brochure, which turned out to be a really nice brief for me.
Alexis Bennett
... writes music for a variety of purposes, mostly composing soundtracks for films. His music has featured in a huge variety of films which have been screened all over the world.
This is a portfolio site which presents Alexis' professional portfolio but also acts as a subtle and sensitive portrait of the person behind the music. At least I hope it does anyway.
Beats Work
... provide creative workshops for businesses. It's a very clever scheme created by of Simon Webster, a professional percussionist specialising in World music. The Beats Work team offer bespoke corporate workshops based on simple percussion games and activities which act as ice-breakers or warm-ups before conferences, meetings etc. The workshops can also be used to sort out problems between people in dysfunctional teams or as a way of helping people to learn better cooperative skills, that sort of thing.
Simon Webster
Professional percussionist and all-round smashing chap, Simon Webster is an exceptional musician with profound knowledge of his field. He's studied all over the world and toured with names as big as Natacha Atlas (trust me, she's big in World music), Rolf Harris (yes, really) and the almost-unspellable Abdullah Chhadeh (trust me, in World music terms, he's The Man).
It could be you
Imagine that. A website of your very own. All posh and smartly-designed like these ones. I've been doing this for about 12 years now so I've had a lot of practice and I've got some very talented friends to help me make things happen.
If you want to work with me on your project, send me an email. I'd be pleased to hear from you.
What's New
Some 2012 projects
This year I will mostly be launching a new site for an office fit-out/ refurbishment company and hopefully a portfolio site for an architects practice...
Some 2011 projects
Launches this year include rebranding/ identity work for the the gourmet group and sexy notebook site (paper notebooks, not computers), gnu stationery.
Some 2010 projects
After several months of stone-cold silence, I've just got round to posting some new project links. (Insert sound of applause).
So, lately I've been working on these: The Home Gourmet, Virtual Lab, and The Guild of Master Craftsmen (amongst other things).
I won this
In June I won an Interactive Media Award for Pooh's Nursery School website. It's a project I'm very proud of and one in which I've invested a lot of love, time and energy.
The Pooh's site was awarded Best In Class, which is ace because that's the highest honour they dish out.
Judging criteria include design, usability, innovation in technical features, standards compliance and content.
To be awarded Best In Class, you have to score at least 90% in each category, so I was really pleased with that. This was the first award contest I've ever entered too, so I'm now obliged to annoy everyone by putting 'award-winning' in front of 'web designer' on everything I write ;-]