David Emery Online

I don't really do web design so much any more - I firmly have a marketing hat on these days (and it's a pretty snazzy hat, let me tell you...).

Below is an archive of previous sites I've worked on.

Damaged Goods Records are a proper little genuine independent record label, and have released records by people like Holly Golightly, Billy Childish, Pete Molinari and even the Manic Street Preachers (they put out their first single). Needless to say it’s been great fun working on their site, although it was a little bit of an exercise in biting off more then I can chew, and digging myself many, many holes of which I had to haul myself out of.

For a start, I decided that to properly try and achieve that ‘punk fanzine’ feel I was going for I would need to do a full page design comp, print it out, staple it together, photograph it and use that as the basis for the final design. From a ‘making it easy to edit, move things and generally make a website’ perspective this was maybe a bad idea…

To rub salt in this self-created wound I had also decided that diagonal lines would be a bit of a focus and – as is probably obvious by the amount of sites that don’t use diagonals – that made everything just that little bit harder. Oh, and did I mention that I wanted to keep everything within a pink/yellow/black colour scheme? Including images?

Yeah, that was a real smart idea.

Images – like the ones you can see on the home page – are uploaded as normal, rectangular full-color photos. I then run them through a GD images-based PHP script that first scales and crops them to the right size, then turns them pink and then finally composes them with the correct diagonal-yellow-background mask. It wasn’t actually that hard but did take a bit of fiddling about with – when I get a chance I’ll do a detailed how-to on how it actually works; I think image manipulation in PHP can really achieve some interesting results so it would be good to get it in more widespread use.

The whole site is – of course – based on Textpattern, and it really pushes it to the limit. The artist pages all rely on the category system, which means that to add a new artist to the site is as simple as adding a new category. However, I did hit up against a few hard walls which means that this site uses a few custom plugins as well (to do things like display the correct artist image on an artist page, based on category).

And yes, the site isn’t fluid width. Sometimes, it’s just not going to be possible – those times mostly being when your design is actually a photo of a website…