October saw three different sites launch. One of these days they may just make an appearance in the portfolio, but in the meantime here’s an overview…

Buddy

This is a single-page site for Pharrell’s new protégé, Buddy. It had a quick turnaround time, but luckily we had some great photography to work with. This one has a liquid design^* and can work at various window sizes.

*Not related to Liquid Design, the company where this writer started his web design career in the late 90s.

Violette New York

A remade site for Vashtie’s clothing line, Violette. It’s always a pleasure working with Vashtie. I’d like to think it’s because we both grew up in the Capital District and can relate to each other on a 518 level, but it’s probably because she’s generally a great person to work with. She wanted to go simple and use a lot of black & white for this one, so we worked in some desaturation magic and kept everything smooth and slick.

The shop uses Big Cartel, which I’d been looking forward to using for a while. I was pleasantly surprised, it was very easy to work with.

The Rens

This was a quick site, (still in progress,) for an NYC youth basketball league, The New Renaissance. This site is currently just a quick overview of this new program, and will grow in the near future to show more about the teams.

The client requested an auto-playing Flash intro, complete with audio. (classic!) So be warned before you click, there may be a loud burst of Jay-Z.

Note: Parts of this site are based on an excellent theme by MKNY Studio.

Back in December 2008, I was brought onboard to redo the official site for N*E*R*D. Another company had been working on it, but the band wasn’t happy with the direction they were going in. I was soon on a call with Pharrell, who was detailing his concepts for the new site: an old-school Atari theme.

This got some wheels churning. As luck would have it, a friend I’ve known since 3rd grade is a big Atari fan and has a pretty large collection. We arranged for him to send me a package of games, controllers and a system. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d do with them, but hoped that the gear would spark some ideas.

And they did! I love those old, classic cartridges. The labels, the graphics, the way they were all worn down from years of use and abuse. I didn’t have an Atari growing up, (we were a Commodore family,) but it took me back.

I then looked to the album artwork, which also had great illustrations:

My next step seemed obvious…

I started laying out the different labels, naming them (some with titles that still make me chuckle,) and got to cutting and pasting (literally this time, not digitally!)

The results:

One thought was to have each cartridge associated with a section of the site, and the homepage would let you select which cartridge to put into the system. (roll over for example.)

In the end I was really happy with the results, but this “real retro” style just didn’t fit in with the “8-bit retro” style of the rest of the site. The cartridges are currently lined up next to my desk, trophies of a concept that didn’t make the cut.

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