Web Design and Development

Sterling is a business that designs and manufactures special after-market custom accessories for trucks and SUVs. Primarily, they create winch mounts, grille guards, roll bars, and utility racks. They distinguish themselves by the high quality of their work. Sterling accessories are built for strength, durability, and custom designed for the make and model of a vehicle. They hired me to redesign their website. Aside from a fresh new look, they wanted a modern responsive design, and to continue using the same Content Management System (CMS), Joomla.

The redesign resulted in strong improvements for meaningful site traffic statistics. New user visits rose 57%, the number of sessions rose 77%, and visit durations rose 8% (based on averages for four-month periods before and after).

The visual aesthetic of my design showcases their products and the level of their work. It's inspired by the structure of their roll bars and grille guards, as well as the layout of Car and Driver's printed magazine. Layout shifts responsively from mobile/phone to tablet to desktop. With the prominence of the contact form, I gave it extra-special consideration to how it followed the design concept. I even added a little customization to the emails that are triggered by the form submission. The image galleries (third party plug-ins) also were custom styled to fit the design. The design needed flexibility to account for additions and changes to content they could make in the future, thus some extra styling rules and considerations also went into the project. I made some simple adjustments to the text content of the site, improving organization and purging obsolete mark-up.

Genevieve V. Beller is a professional designer for the theatre specializing in costumes. I created her personal portfolio website using HTML5 and CSS3, giving her a place to showcase her designs, her creations, and other work in the theatre such as producing. I also created her logo, a geometric, art-deco inspired sigil of her monogram GVB.

Putting as much emphasis as possible on her work was what she wanted out of a design. I crafted a minimal approach with a clean white background, black text, a few border lines, and a little bit of highlight color. The pages are responsive.

I made Dice Chucker, a Javascript web app for generating random number series as if rolling dice. The idea for this came to me while practicing my Javascript. I was working on some utility functions for games. One of these was my function diceRoll(), which is at the core of Dice Chucker. After building the utility function, I decided to make a web app for using it.

From top to bottom, every part of Dice Chucker is my work. I laid out the site in HTML (including playing with some of the new HTML5 input attributes like type="number") and wrote an attaching script in JQuery/Javascript. The script gathers all the main input and configuration values, calls on diceRoll() to make a roll object (and keeping a history array), and populates both tables with the results data (tailored to config settings). Events for Click, Keyboard, and Change are bound to the page, including extra buttons to increment/decrement the main inputs, toggling visibility for current results, refreshing or clearing history results, and opening/closing accordion panels. For completeness of presentation, I wrote a dedicated stylesheet as well.

Lauren Gaston is a professional designer of theatrical costumes. I created her personal portfolio website as a bespoke template for the content management system Joomla and provided instruction on how to administrate it so that she could update content herself.

The design was inspired by Lauren's design renderings, specifically her fantastic painting skills with watercolors and goauche. Subtle texture comes from images of coarse and smooth watercolor papers, and the header and footer let the irregular deckle edge hang over the page, with pullout paper tabs for primary navigation. The nameplate on the header was created in photoshop to appear like a stencil cutout, revealing colorful dyed fabric below. The content area appears to be drawn out in pencil lines, with a gentle blue watercolor wash as background. the overall look is light to keep the focus on the images.

As a concept project, I made a website for a real band called Red Elvises. They play a blend of surf rock and rockabilly they call "Kick-ass rock'n'roll from Siberia" because most of their original members came from the now former Soviet Union. Their music is fun and they put on an energetic show with lots of personality.

You can compare my work with their actual site: redelvises.com.

I created a site designed to match the music and their schtick, as well as improve the organization and consistency. It's a blend of Soviet propaganda and 1950's (when surf and rockabilly music got started) kitsch, such as the poster background (from their actual merchandise/advertising), my illustrated icons, and display typefaces. As an experiment, the navigation is unconventional and not practical for a contemporary site, but it was fun to play around with it.