El Cuarto Año High School Site Launches

This was the final project of a few students, with the initial idea being to take what was once just a printed literary magazine and put it online, but it grew into something that could be a larger web presence for the high school as a whole. Prior to this site El Cuarto Año had only a small paragraph under the Association House of Chicago website.

A few students were responsible for gathering and editing all of the content, while my faculty contact and all around great guy Mr. Zapata kept them on track. I set up the system and design, gave advice on hosting and domain selection, and will train them this fall so that they’ll be able to upload their own content without assistance.

Website includes:

  • All Design and Development
  • Customized WordPress Theme based on Modularity
  • Image Galleries and Music Players

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FugScreens Studios Launches

Zissou at FugScreens approached me to help with the launch of a new site for his studio, one that was separate from his own personal portfolio website. He had a few ideas about the look but wanted to stress simplicity. This is the design I came up using their logo for inspiration and incorporating his hand drawn graphic ink splatters.

The entire site was built on WordPress allowing him and interns the ability to update everything without much knowledge of code. The most important aspect was selecting a solid gallery plugin that would allow for an unlimited number of galleries, and an unlimited number of images in each. They can be used to showcase student artwork, or his own pieces for sale.

Screenprinting studio site includes:

  • Design and Development
  • Custom WordPress Theme
  • PayPal Integration for Simple Shopping Cart

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Simple, Gray, pretty much Awesome

That was the extent of Megan’s website requirements laid out in her design brief* when we started the project.

Using her own custom business card as inspiration we came up with a clean and open layout that wouldn’t distract from her artwork, as well as featuring her custom designs for sale on Etsy. All data for the galleries is maintained in XML allowing her to update on her own quickly, and since the store imports its data directly from Etsy any changes made on that site will instantly be reflected here.

As the galleries were all displayed using Flash and SimpleViewer, I created a custom mobile site that would allow quick access to all her contact info, designs, artwork and store without the use of any plug-ins. Useful for when she’s out schmoozing and networking around town. Dynamic PHP and CSS means no second set of data has to be maintained just for this mobile site and version control issues are eliminated.

Portfolio site includes:

  • Custom Design
  • Etsy API Integration
  • SimpleViewer Customization
  • Mobile Versions for Android, iPhone and Blackberry

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* By design brief I really just mean the conversation about her future website over sushi :)

Emily Hoskins’ Portfolio Launched

I’m proud to announce the completion of my friend Emily’s new photography portfolio. I’m really please with the way it turned out. It was a smooth project to work on, the only goals were that it were clean and simple to use, and that it look better than all of her friend’s photgraphy sites ;). Done and done.

The only snag that came up was near the end of the project when I upgraded to the newest version of SlideShowPro. The old param.xml file no longer worked so I had to compare the new version’s attributes to the old and port back all the old styles. A frustrating couple hours for sure.

Simple photography portfolio site includes:

  • Design
  • SlideshowPro Photo Gallery Customization

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ThesePeople v2 Launched

Launched the brand new version of the ThesePeople website to coincide with our 75th sketch. There were quite a lot of goals to accomplish with this new version over the last including:

  • Sketches, right up front played in the great JW Player! It’s a video sketch troupe, featured videos need to be right front and center when you come in
  • Video comments from users. We weren’t setting out to recreate the functionality of YouTube or anything but getting feedback from viewers was important
  • Photos galleries using SlideShowPro to better show off the pretty faces and behind-the-scenes antics
  • Clear and concise merchandise ordering pages, accessible right in the sidebar

ThesePeopleDesign & development of a website for Detroit, Michigan based comedy troupe ThesePeople, includes:

  • HTML, CSS
  • PHP & MySQL Backend
  • Flash Video
  • Closed Captioning for accessibility
  • iPhone & Android compatible video player

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