Work
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.
After having made the first phase of Jack Penate’s site, featuring the polaroids, we then moved on to creating a full site, with news, tour dates, videos, photos, forum etc. On this site a filled the design + direct roll again; which was probably a good idea as it does some quite nifty things.
First things first is that it intergrates with Twitter, so that Jack can text updates from the road which then appear in the little speech bubble top right on the site. Next, instead of using Textpattern – which powers most of the site – to do the photo gallery, instead we pull photos from Flickr instead so they are easy to update. I’m also quite chuufed with the way we’ve enabled commenting on almost everything, most notably tour dates.
Following on from the remix site we did for them we then fleshed out their entire site. This would be another site all done by me – design, html css et al – and also all based on Textpattern, surprise surprise.
Probably the most interesting thing about this site is that it took only 2 days, start to finish, to make – including all the design, page building, coding etc.
As Electrelane were going out on tour with the Arcade Fire, we decided it would be a lovely idea if they could do a bit of blogging while they saw the sites out of their bus window.
YATBS (yet another Textpattern based site), and again I did the design and concept and left all the real work to someone else.
This is a fun little site we made (designed/directed by me) for RJD2, where you could post up videos onto YouTube and RJ would respond. Needless to say, it’s a “mashup” I guess as it interacts with the YouTube API, and also does some nifty things with YUI.
The jolly duo I Was A Cub Scout came to us with a very low-ff (polite for rubbish) site, so we thought the best thing to do was to build them a whole new one.
Me = designer + director.
Check out the mixtape if you get the chance – it’s really rather good.
For Jack Penate’s debut single, “Second, Minute or Hour”, each one of the limited 7 inch’s had a unique, numbered polaroid photo – taken by Jack – attached to the front. To tie in with this physical campaign, we built a site – all based on Textpattern – where you could claim your polaroid by uploading a picture of you with your copy. Again, I designed and directed this one – I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
This is a little lite we put together to promote Black Strobe’s first album, “A Remix Selection”. I did the design, directioin and concept of the site but left the heavy lifting to our crack term of web monkeys.
The site originally featured a remix contest where you could download all the individual pieces of the sinlge “Shining Bright Star”, remix them and then upload them to the site – all wrapped with a nifty little voting mechanism.
I’m particularly pleased (if I do say so myself!) how this site turned out; we got given a whole load of really nice photos from the band and we really wanted to incorporate them at the core of the site, as they really represented what the band is about. We ended up using yet more javascript wizardry to dynamically scale the background photos to fit the size of the browser window, and then took advantage of transparent pngs (with gif fallback on IE) to layer content on top.
It is, or course, another site based on a Textpattern back end. It’s got to a point now that implementing a band site in Textpattern really takes no time at all, such is Textpattern’s flexibility coupled with a few choice plugins ( upm_img being the most notable).
At work we’ve just launched the new site for the band Devastations:
As per normal, it’s all based on Textpattern which is by far and away the easiest and most flexible blog engine out there at the moment. I’ve recently been playing around with Wordpress, and while their are some things I like – the look of the interface is much nicer then Textpattern, although it’s laid out oddly in places – it doesn’t seem to be as easily customisable like Textpattern is.
This is the site for the start-up I co-run while I’m not trying to sell records. Again, all based off Textpattern, all though this will probably change quite soon into something much more exciting.
The buildings were drawn by James, who’s the other half of Culture – the rest of the design is mine. Stay tunes – this is only the first iteration; we plan on adding many more improvements as time goes on.
Where to even begin on this site; boy does it have a lot packed in! It’s based on Textpattern which powers both the News and also the Shoutout section (which is all based on Textpattern’s comment system). There’s liberal use of javascript, for the player, the ticker (which also uses Ajax so it stays up to date with the latest shoutouts), the News which is also all Ajax-ified (so that you can sit and listen to the music, which is about an hour and a half long, and still navigate the site) and also the little jingle knobs as well.
Needless to say, it’s a pretty complicated site, with lots of little bits like the mix (which was done by Basement Jaxx), the quicktime player and the flash animations at the top all being done externally and then all coming together at the last minute.
It all worked out quite nicely in the end though…
For Thom Yorke’s recent solo album release as I was involved with two of the sites as part of the online campaign.
Firstly, the “Emergency Channel Broadcast System”, which I designed and coded, where we uploaded assorted info and Thom videos. It’s also worth noting that the videocast related to it got to number 13 on the iTunes podcast chart, and number 1 in the music podcast chart!
www.xlrecordings.com/theeraser
Secondly, I did a similar job on the “Have You Seen This Man” site. We built a 9ft tall version of the man from the front of the records artwork, complete with headphones so you could listen to the album, and took him round central London. On the site you could then upload your photos of the man, and see all the photos uploaded.
www.xlrecordings.com/haveyouseenthisman
Winner of “Best Artist Campaign” at the 2006 Digital Music Awards.
Winner of “Best Use of Mobile” at the 2006 Digital Music Awards.
This site was an interesting challenge. Again, it’s another site where I did all the design and coding and again it’s based off Textpattern. However, this time all the content is all in french and in the development of the site there were quite a few stumbling blocks getting content and the like on the site due to the translation issue. All worked out nicely in the end though – this was also the first public use of the image scaling technique you can see on these pages.
Being a big fan of the band I jumped at the chance to overhaul their site – before it was a nasty frame-based monstrosity. Another Textpattern site, where I did the design and html/css.
Another design/html/css bit of work. For this site we decided to go for something simple and compact – not every band site needs to be super info packed and complicated.
This site was a pleasure to do, as the source art – all created by v23 – is lovely. Also, more use of the javascript audio player (why would anyone use Flash to do this sort of thing is beyond me…).
For this site (design – yes! html – yes! css – yes!) the main elements were done by Mike Norris, which I then took and webified. More Textpattern usage, yet again.
For the wonderful band The Rogers Sisters we completely overhauled their old site, giving them a whole new design and basing the whole site on the Textpattern CMS.
Yet another label site (although this one was freelance as opposed to for my employer). Also, yet another complete redesign – I was responsible for the design and all the html and css.
Design-html-css as always. Of note though, is the javascript audio player which is quite nifty (is I do say so myself!) -featuring automatic playback of playlists and simple markup.