November 10th, 2009
Recently Uniq Sites was asked to redesign the home page for the newly formed Shoal River Middle School of Crestview, Florida. Shoal River Middle School (SRMS) was built as a replacement to Crestview’s oldest Middle School Richbourg Middle School.
Since, I am an alumni of Richbourg Middle School and my mother was a teacher there for 30 years and happens to be moving her classroom to the new Shoal River Middle School I was approached to do a redesign of their website for their first year in education.
They had a very simple site but were not happy with the design. When talking with the head of their IT department, she mentioned that she wanted people go to the website and say “Wow! Shoal River Middle School has a really informative and professional website.” I knew that she also wanted the ability to update the website herself.
So, I kept the same layout and color scheme but added a few finishing touches to really make the design “Pop!” and I also set up a Dreamweaver template so that she could finish the site and make updates herself.
Check out the screen-shots of the before and after:
I was very satisfied with the way that everything came out and received this feedback from the client:
“WOW!!!!! I LOVE IT!!!!! It looks sooooo professional. You have such a good eye.“
Bottom line: It was a great project and I am happy to have been a part of it.
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June 11th, 2009
This weeks Illustration Friday topic was “Craving.” As soon as I saw this topic I knew exactly what I wanted to illustrate. Cheesecake. It is my absolute favorite dessert and I will always have room in my stomach for a slice. I love all different types of cheesecake but my favorite recipe is plain cheesecake drenched in chocolate and caramel. /here is my Illustration Friday Craving rendition of chocolaty, caramel covered, cheesecake.
Topic: Craving
Date: June 5, 2009
It’s not a perfect illustration but I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on it. In the future I’ll go back and round out the chocolate and caramel so that it looks more realistic.
Anyway, what do you think? Good concept? Good illustration? Let me know.
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May 8th, 2009
Introducing Illustration Friday
About a month ago I ran across a website called Illustration Friday. I started looking around and discovered that it wasn’t just a blog website but a creative challenge website. Every Friday the website presents a new topic. The challenge is to design something that interprets the topic. I thought it was a great idea. I also thought that it would be a great way for me to practice both my illustration and conceptualization. I decided that I would try to participate at least once a month. So, without further ado…
Topic: Hierarchy
Date: May 5, 2009
As soon as I saw this topic I thought of a King and Queen. What conveys a hierarchy better then royalty? I liked this concept so I stayed with the general idea but began to explore it further. The next thing I saw where chess pieces, specifically the king and queen pieces. Then I thought about the king and queen on a deck of cards and that idea stuck. It did evolve some though. Originally I was going to show just the king and queen cards but then I decided to included the other face cards and somehow it transformed into a Royal Flush in poker.
I thought that a Royal Flush would be great because it shows the hierarchy of the cards from the Ace, to the King, the Queen, then the Jack and finally the 10. In fact, the great thing about this graphic is that it not only shows the hierarchy in the cards but in the hand. In poker you can’t be a Royal Flush. So it’s obviously the highest hand in the game. I think this was a great concept and am a bit surprised at how easily it came to me. It was literally a matter of minutes.
What do you think? Good concept? Good illustration? Let me know.
Posted in Illustration Friday | 1 Comment »
May 5th, 2009
I built this site almost a year ago when I decided that I wanted to try my hand at freelancing specializing in small business website design. Looking back it’s amazing how much I’ve learned and how my website design and programming skills have evolved. I haven’t been happy with the design on this website for some time now. I don’t think it was ever bad. But it certainly wasn’t my best work either. About a month ago I began the process of redesigning the website. As a result Uniq Sites now has a revised logo, a new website design and a blog.
The Logo
I spent about a month revising the logo before I began working on the website design. I wanted to adapt it to further help project Uniq Sites as a professional yet approachable small business website design company. I think the revised logo defiantly conveys that message. I’m very happy with the way the that S and the E came out.
Here’s the old logo:
And the new revised one:
Was it really an improvement? Comment below to let me know what you think.
The Website
It took me almost another month after finalizing the logo to finalize the website design and then to develop it. I had the same goals for the new website design as I did for the logo. I think the new design suites the direction of the website much better.
And here’s the old website design:
And the new one:
How about this? Is it better?
The Blog
Since I decided to start freelancing I’ve wanted to add a blog to Uniq Sites. Now that I think about it, I’m not really sure why I haven’t until now. And to be honest, I decided at the last minute to include it in this new version of Uniq Sites. My obvious lack of planning accounts for the unincorporated design for the blog portion of the website. Right now it is just he default Wordpress theme with a few minor changes. I promise in the future I will theme the blog to match the rest of Uniq Sites.
Well, I guess that concludes my first official blog post for Uniq Sites. There will definately be more in the future so please subscribe to the RSS feed.
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