Clint Adam Smyth Photography

Chris Roberts designed the general look of the print work for Clint Adam Smyth Photography. I took the elements he had established and used them as material and inspiration for the website.

Since Clint's work is photography, I didn't see much point in designing a text-heavy website. Since he does so much fine art photography, I took the metaphor of a gallery and made the primary navigation of the site side-scrolling. This is actually something I have not seen on any other site (it's also after I designed this site that I discovered keyboard arrow keys will scroll browser windows sideways as well as up and down). I'm now waiting for Hi-Definition TV to become common so I can browse the site on a 16:9 monitor!

Once the basic metaphor had been established, the rest fell into place. I made all the photographs the same height so they would line up neatly, I designed a series of backgrounds that shared certain elements but provided a different backdrop for each section and showed off the images, and I took the navigation elements for the site from Clint's photographs. The extremely large text elements draw the viewer into wanting to see what's "to the right" of the window, as do the right-justified navigation buttons.

Once the site was up and running, I taught Clint how to maintain the site himself, since he was moving his business to Toronto, Ontario.

Tools used:
Netscape Navigator Gold to sketch out basic ideas.
Ofoto to scan the photographs.
Photoshop to colour correct (this was before the annoying "improvements" Adobe made to the way Photoshop 5 handles RGB, making it almost useless for web work).
BBEdit to build the website itself.
Fetch to handle transfers to the server.

Collage-Ad Vancouver Dining Guide

Warning! High Bandwidth!

This was basically a printed guide that the client wanted reproduced exactly. As a result, it's pretty much a graphical dump of the original brochure, with internal links for navigation. Since it's dual-language (English and Japanese) I made sure each restaurant ad was linked to a higher- resolution scan that would be legible even if the smaller full-page versions weren't. I also made the maps in the brochure into image maps, so they could be used as an alternative for navigation.

I included this as an example of how existing material can be pretty well transferred exactly, even if the original material was not designed with repositioning to the web in mind. Although a little clunky, it is still useable.

Tools used:
Basically the same as the ones listed above, with the addition of:
QuarkXpress (the brochure was in this format).
Terry Morse's Myrmidon, a brilliant piece of software that turns any program with a print function into a web-publishing program. No web designer's toolbox should be without this piece of software.

There's more to come, but it's late, I'm tired, and I'll get to more of this later...