We stuck with Amy’s existing color palette of light blue and white, and Amy chose a fabulous font for her text (Typekit makes that part a breeze). Using WordPress’ new Custom Header feature, we were able to it up so Amy can switch out her blog’s header whenever the mood strikes – and with all these beautiful photos to choose from, the mood will strike often!

The slideshow on the home page and the portfolio pages uses jQuery rather than Flash, so it can be viewed on devices like the iPhone and the iPad. But we didn’t stop there: using WPTouch Pro, we created a mobile-specific version of Amy’s site that gives smartphone users a customized landing page and a special reduced-size image gallery.

Lisa Komer, Munchkin Designs’ owner, makes the most adorable custom-designed printed materials. And her site is pretty cute, too, if we do say so ourselves. Drop by and check out her new line of tees!

Taste Chocolate

Taste Chocolate is a Portland, OR (local for us) company that runs high-end chocolate tastings, similar to wine tastings; and of course sells the chocolates as well. If you are in the Portland area, check it out. It’s a lot of fun and in addition to being a mouth watering experience, it’ll change the way you think of chocolate.

We had a blast with this project, it was a complete identity, from logo design, cards and promotional materials to website to press-kits. Much of the photography used throughout was ours as well, taken at live tastings. This project forced us to really think about how we can use shopify to do things that it doesn’t natively do. We’ve got tag-based product recommendations here for example, which might not seem like a big deal, but gave us a warm-fuzzy.

Could we replicate the effect in Photoshop? Well, sort of, but it wouldn’t be easy or 100% right.

There is also a random element to using the lensbaby that we love. Often we don’t get the picture we thought we were getting, but what we do get is even better.

Things we love about it:
1. The pictures we take with this are like nothing else we’ve done.
2. Craig Strong (President and Co-Founder) of lensbabies is a truly nice guy, as are his crew and the dedicated lensbaby users.
3. They are locally made here in Portland, OR
4. It looks like a cross between a lunar lander and a vaccum hose.

These things definitely have a bit of a learning curve, but classes and workshops are available (I took one and had a wonderful time). If you get a chance we recommend you try one out, they’re just too fun to miss out on.

Mark Wyner’s presentation had very little to do with tattooing (or being a big dork, although he did compare the internet to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books) and more to do with the way design and development can learn to work together to create a more useful and comprehensive whole. Basically it comes down to Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interface Markup and Functionality holding hands and playing nicely together to create sites that are not only pretty, but also functional, easy to maintain and accessible to a wide variety of consumers.

We’ve been devouring information about accessibility and semantic markup lately, so this session was particularly topical. We’ll link to the slides once we upload the pictures from the “good” camera and can decipher the URL on his closing slide. Seriously, you’d think that all those notes would have included that one vital bit of info, but you’d be wrong.

Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design, mark wyner, experience design

Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design