A few months ago I was approached via recommendation by a director of freshly-founded company, Performance Nutrition. With extensive experience of its director, Performance Nutrition was aiming at top athletes and performers as well as business executives. The website was to serve such an audience, with its focus of using targeted nutrition for improved performance.

From the beginning of the project we had a mutual understanding with the client that the site was to be sleek, but simple and minimalistic – and this was a job exactly for me.

We started with corporate identity – company needed a recognizable logo. After the number of trials I came up with the one below, where the logo’s symbol can also be used as a standalone element. The circle itself is such a great symbol with so many positive meaning (including ‘full cycle’, ‘circulation’ and ‘harmony’), and now it also contained stylized letters P and N.

After the business cards with the new logo were designed and printed out, I put a temporarily page online and started working on the website.

Once we agreed on the website’s look and feel ,as well as the structure, and the designs of the home page and the content page were signed off, I could start developing. From that point on I could avoid wasting time in Photoshop, moving around elements in multiple templates, but rather make changes directly in the HTML build, using graphic editor only for working on certain design elements. This approach usually saves me time and my clients’ money.

As the website was going to be rather static (mostly copy), I opted for WordPress as the platform, which would make it easy for my client to update the copy or add/remove subpages, as well as would be an appropriate tool for updating News and Articles sections.

I’ve built the website using some CSS3 properties (nothing too crazy ;) and added a bit of jQuery for smoother experience. Also, for the first time in my projects, I used @font-face for the main and sub- navigation, which would allow to change the website structure without resorting to Photoshop. I felt it was the right time for the use of the technology.

As with most of start-up or companies that never did business online, the copy was a real stumbling block. And this is something we, designers and develops can hardly help with. We can nudge in the right direction, but we can’t write the copy. But, at the same time, this is something that can be accumulated over a period of time with increasing experience and understanding what website users real want.

The website is launched, but we continue collaboration. After the business grows and the website is filled with more content, we will have a better idea what functionality and interactivity we can add. A website is not a static entity, it is supposed to be alive and ever changing and improving after trials and errors. And this is great, this is what makes our work exciting.

www.theperformancenutritionist.com/

www.golden.lv

It was one of my first clients when I started freelancing about 7 years ago. No surprise by now the website needed a redesign (yes, it was built with tables), what I was asked to do few months ago.

I wanted to create something very special, to stand out from competitor websites, and also to try myself in a quite unusual for myself, illustrative style. I went for bright colors, playful feel and used jQuery to add some animation to make website more fun.

To be perfectly honest, I think, I was too ambitions. I was working on really tight budget and realized that it ran out in the middle of the project. And I still had to deliver two more languages… It was a bit of a gamble from my side, but I really wanted to design something beyond client’s initial brief and expectations.

In the end I still had to cut down on few ideas to be able to implement all languages and fully working CMS. So don’t judge me too harsh. Also, hopefully website owner will not forget to keep it updated, with 3 languages it can get messy…

Just like with the other website that was launched around the same time, I made use of CSS3 properties to give an extra touch to the website, so view it in a modern browser (not Internet Explorer 8 or lower) to get the best experience.

Coming as a late update… www.commonground.se

A month ago or so I soft-launched a new website for Dan Hegelund, an long-time client of mine. This time it was a website for a church in Sweden, where he is currently based.

We started working on the website about 2 years ago, but had to stop at one point due to a number of reasons, and then a few months ago the project was restarted.

Needles to say, since we started the design has changed. A lot. At least twice. It’s always very hard to pick up on a project if it was on hold for a long period time, and also during these 2 years my design ideas and skills also changed (hopefully, evolved), so I just did not like what I had come up with initially . I believe it was quite frustrating for Dan to hear me saying: ‘We have to wait a little bit more. I need more time. I am still not entirely happy with the design.’ But client’s trust is the best thing in your relations. Just don’t push it :) And I believe his wait wasn’t in vain.

The site is built using WordPress engine, like the majority of the websites I build nowadays. Essentially it’s a combination of blog, news and event poster. The core requirement for the project was to be content managed as much as possible, and this consideration required extensive WordPress customization and hacking.

Dan is still playing with website’s structure to adjust it to the church’s and users’ needs and hopefully I will get a green light very soon to add final design touches and some extra functionality. It feels like it is going to be a quite big on-going project and I still got few ideas up my sleeves.

Note: I used some CSS3 properties in this project, so the website looks best in modern browsers, like Firefox, Chrome or Safari. Hopefully, Internet Explorer will also catch up soon.

Another website designed and built. I told you I’d been busy :)

This time it is a young real estate agency in UK. I was recommended for the job by my ex-boss (thanks for that ;) and it was a very enjoyable ride.

I guess the most interesting thing about this project was the fact that the only form of communication which we used was though emails. I haven’t seen my client in person yet and haven’t even heard his voice:) He lives outside London and was quite busy at that time for initial meetings and somehow this email-only form was established.

Even more WordPress tweaking, and more functionality in the back-end. The website features a clean and rather minimalist design (I guess this is quite characteristic of me) and was built based on client’s requirements. One of them was presenting property information in .pdf and having a preview on the website rather than posting all the description on the website. This probably wasn’t the best solution ever, but it still made the information quite accessible and also would make it easier for client to update the website with a less risk of breaking the pages.

Hopefully website will be filled with more content shortly. Next week I will be meeting my client (for the first time :) to show him how to make updates on the website though the CMS.

www.everardcole.co.uk

Last week I’ve launched a new website for a music festival in London, Brick Lane Takeover, an event organized and sponsored by Macmillan Cancer Support, a big UK charity organization.

Macmillan maintains a very strong corporate identity on print and in digital, and this was the biggest challenge, when building the website (together with the time constrains, which is a very common thing in our industry). You can have 3 colours, and all of them are… green. Literally. Light green, green and dark green. Not much, huh. The same goes with the typefaces – a very limited number with no chance for variation. No wonder the design went through a number of revisions :)

Hopefully, I have managed to incorporate those guidelines without loosing the very spirit of the event – youthful, bold and loud. Actually, it turned up to be too ‘bold’ and too ‘loud’ – I had made a mistake of creating it on 17” laptop where everything looked balanced and legible, but when we opened the site on a more typical monitor… OMG!! everything was HUUUUGE, so I had to hastily change the size of the most of the graphics on the website. Lesson learned.

The website and its Content Management System were built using glorious WordPress, an amazing open-source framework, but that does not mean that I hadn’t had my share of banging-my-head-against-the-wall moments :)

Enjoy the website – www.bricklanetakeover.org.uk, hope you will like it. And maybe buy a tickets and go to see the bands live…

This time it was a website redesign for family holiday celebration in Latvia. The color scheme was probably the biggest challenge of all (apart from working on someone else’s code :), for the client could not decide which one he wanted to go with :) You can see a bit of a process below.

Go to the portfolio to see how website looked before and now, see one of the rejected version or go and see redesigned website itself.

A microsite for a small London investment company was built based on company’s brochure. The task was to create a simple to use site, which reflects clean and light IIR’s brochure’s design and brings the information in web format. Clean, semantic and valid mark-up, separate print version and additional SEO optimization. A quick and painless job :)

See screenshots in the portfolio or see project online.

Here comes another baby :) A promotional website for another concert of my loved client :) Had to pull myself quite hard to get it done inside a week. Similar to the previous project, Christmas Night, it is a single page, but unlike that website, the information is split in few chunks here, which change with a bit of animation when you click the navigation links. So there is no need for pages reload and browsing between sections is smooth and painless :) I am also planning to reuse this starry night design for the concert’s posters and flyers.

See Winter Lights in the portfolio. Or launch Winter Lights website.