Web Design & Development
While my forté keeps me busy with type design, I have been known to tackle frequent web design jobs. I do enjoy a bit of code wrangling. This list is a smattering of past projects, some of which can still be found alive on the World Wide Web.
Regarding my skills, I write XHTML with CSS (quite often compliantly), PHP with MySQL, and a bit of Javascript. I shun WYSIWYG HTML editors. I prefer the hands on approach to coding which affects my design sensibility – all that form follows function jazz. I am not a decorator. I aim to make clean, usable, economical websites.
Contact me if you like what you see and want some for yourself, or if you need your current website improved to meet current web standards. I can handle every aspect of the job, from securing domain names and hosting and SSL certificates to custom content management development and custom e-commerce and shopping cart applications. My rates and services are scalable to work within most budgets. I apparently have a soft-spot for artists, small business owners, and creative entrepreneurs.
Art Los Angeles Contemporary
I was contracted by Fair Grounds Associates as designer and webmaster for their brand new art fair, Art Los Angeles Contemporary. I use the term “brand new” in the most literal sense because we built everything from the ground up, including two custom type families. I built the entire website from scratch, complete with a custom content management system and a password-protected VIP admin for guests to RSVP for special events during the fair.
Martha Mulholland
Martha is a classy southern debutant at heart and she needed a classy, respectful portfolio of her interior decoration and visual merchandising work. The deadline was short and some of her documentation needed refinement, but we were able to put together this concise and professional mini-site to give her talents some deserved attention.
Alexander May
Alex and I are both graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a far finer fine artist than I am, but I can build websites for artists that are too busy making fine fine art. Alex has an eye for the most beautiful and minimal design. It is apparent in his work, and we managed to carry the aesthetic through his website's design.
Sandy de Lissovoy
I met Sandy on a consultation to Rosamund Felsen's gallery in Santa Monica where he works as Rosamund's assistant and gallery manager. Although I advised Rosamund to stick with her current webmaster, Sandy later contacted me for a portfolio site. I incorporated Vimeo embedding for his video pieces and a Javascript dropdown menu for thumbnail navigation on the project-level pages.
Horton Gallery
Sunday, a contemporary art gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was going through some exciting changes. Proprietor, Sean Horton, was moving to Chelsea and transforming the operation into Horton Gallery. What better time to build a new website? This is another incarnation of the same CMS and front-end framework I built for Andrew Rafacz and Kavi Gupta.
Kavi Gupta Gallery
Kavi and his staff needed a website that they could manage themselves. I redesigned the site to their specs and built them a custom content manager using all the PHP that I’ve developed for other jobs. We were able to launch after about a week’s work. It was a rush job. I was about to move to LA and they were headed to Miami for all the art fairs. Small-scale agile development at its very best. They uploaded all the content as I built out the front-end.
Black Tent Press
The folks at Black Tent Press needed to sell some records. I equipped them with this simple website based on their design sketches and added MP3 previews and custom PayPal buttons. Check out the exquisite tunes and buy some of that quality vinyl packaged in hand-printed sleeves.
Arlo Graphic Design
Ryan Halvorsen over at Arlo Graphic Design needed to update the Arlo site. We collaborated on the structure and finer points of the navigation while Ryan provided the amazing content and populated the MySQL database himself.
Annie Hagar
I built Annie's site with the same artist portfolio CMS that I've given all my other clients, but used a new navigation and layout based on the Arlo site.
Andrew Rafacz Gallery
Long ago, I built a website for Chicago's Bucket Rider Gallery. Now it has blossomed into a full-fledged commercial art gallery donning the name of its sole proprietor and namesake, Mr Andrew Rafacz. I built this website for him as well.
TypeTrust
TypeTrust is the digital font boutique I formed with Neil Summerour in 2005. I wrote most of the CSS, developed parts of the font previewing functions, and fine-tuned the shopping cart and customer account pages.
Ginny Krueger
Ginny had a 4 year old website and an MIA webmaster. It was clearly time for an update, so she came to me for help. I provided my standard portfolio design with the basic content manager. I helped her upload the images and she updated the text information and voila... new website.
Anne Taft
Anne is another Chicago artist for whom I provided web presence. She didn't require anything fancy, and I launched her site in record time working from code I had written for my other artist portfolio websites.
Nick Bridge
Nick was interested in adding more flexibility and control to his pre-existing online portfolio, so I expanded upon all the CMS apps that I've written over the last year and gave him a clean redesign with robust tools for sorting and categorizing his images.
Elizabeth Scott
Elizabeth contacted me looking for something similar to what I did for fellow YA author/idol John Green. She just wanted the simplicity to be simpler and the color to be less brown. I couldn't refuse. I love simple, and blue is my third favorite color.
Nicole Gordon
Nicole emailed me requesting my website services just as I attained SQL enlightenment. I built her an intuitive CMS by which she uploaded her content, and I built this simple design around her complex and colorful work.
Judith Mullen
Judith shares studio space with Nicole, and it wasn't long before word reached her that Nicole had a website. Judith's CMS is the same. I simply pared down the front-end to a white-cube aesthetic and she uploaded the content.
John Green
This was my first major foray into Blogger implementation. John is able to update a few of the sections himself via Blogger. I designed and coded everything using extensive PHP and CSS.
UPDATE: Looks like John has expanded his site to talk about his next book, An Abundance of Katherines, and the Hollywood adaptation of his first novel, Looking for Alaska. I'm happy he kept my original design.