Just completed a makeover to the History section of the Hollywood Sign Trust website, which now has an 11 part overview of its original construction and the various ups and downs it has experienced over the years (much like any Hollywood star).
There’s also a ton of interesting historical photos courtesy of a Hollywood photo archive. Amazing to see that quaint casaba field sitting in what it now dense urbanity.
A new blog-powered website for singer songwriter Tommy Rickard.
The look uses a dark blue theme with a distressed image of stars for the background. The header winds classic So Cal palm trees, rooftops, silhouetted mountains, and a road to evoke the nighttime mood and sights of living in LA.
This site utilizes a customized WordPress underpinning to power all the content, so Tommy can easily edit pages, add and move photos, post gigs and news, and more without having to touch any code.
This content feeds onto the front page, so fans can check in on news and upcoming gigs without having to dig deeper in the site.
The music player includes a cool javascript player that streams entire songs from his catalog and is completely secure from those that might attempt to download the underlying tunes.
Tommy is finishing up a new full length record, including a song he wrote with Linda Perry called “Jackie.” He’s been putting the record together with his band in Rich McCulley’s Red Hill Recording Studio. Stay tuned!
A new capability website for consulting firm Richard Dill and Associates, an international company that provides services in construction project management, owner representation, financial services, and more. This portfolio is intended for clients to explore the wide range of services available through the company and learn more about their experience.
For a palette, we chose a classic neutral scheme, which is reminiscent of the color of monuments and stone. Very solid and grounded in appearance, firm, stately, elegant and impressive. The content window is the lightest area to allow high readability on the text and to make that area pop. Against this palette, the logo and any pictures with color pop nicely as well.
To add texture, we screened building plan schematics over the page. Texture adds a feeling of richness and quality to a color. Also, schematics add a sense of precise technical expertise to the look, which supports the branding message. This screening is light so as not to compete with the text and content.
The photos on the Homepage and the Past Projects are set in a gently fading slideshow format to demonstrate quickly the breadth of geography and projects in the company’s portfolio. Other photos from past projects are placed in sets of threes in almost every page, providing a lot of visual interest on each page.
The contact page uses a contact form to minimize spam.
Just completed an upgrade to the Hollywood Sign Trust website, bringing the Seeing The Sign area up to date. The centerpiece is an interactive map of the Los Angeles area, showing simply where the best locations for viewing and photographing the Sign are.
Clicking on any location in the map takes you to detailed information on that location, including live Google Maps with directions, location photo samples, nearby attractions, and parking information.
Also added a cool pop lightbox effect for the photo samples, which uses a compact script to bring a nicely rendered window right over the regular content.
We also rewrote all the content to bring it up to date.
Perry/Reece Casting has cast over 100 feature films and over 300 television projects, receiving many awards and honors for their work along the way. Some of their most noted movies are “Cocoon”, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Ordinary People”, “Midnight Express”, “Young Guns”, “The Jerk” and “Time Cop”.
They’ve discovered many talented people including Michele Pfeiffer, Cuba Gooding Jr., Heather Graham, Judge Reinhold, Daryl Hannah, Mila Jovovitch, Dennis Quaid, Diane Lane, Linda Hamilton, Steve Guttenberg, Fred Savage, Robin Wright Penn, Timothy Hutton, Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Patrick Dempsey, Armand Assante, Brad Davis, Dermot Mulroney, Rachel Ward and Kelly McGillis to name a few.
This new micro-site, designed in concert with our friends at Active Submissions, gives a quick overview of their considerable catalog of casting credits and the team that carries out this work. There’s a full credit list, divided by type of project, and a great casting reel with memorable moments from many of the films they’ve worked on. The reel is placed in a player that auto-detects the bandwidth of each site visitor and serves up video tuned to their connection, assuring a great viewing experience no matter what the connection.
The site is designed in a single window format around a funny old photograph, which is placed in a simple picture frame and “mounted” on a concrete wall. The neutral, earthy hues let the content and reel shine, and the quirky look speaks right to the unique place Perry/Reece holds in the industry and their singular perspective.
It has been a pleasure working alongside Heroes star Jimmy Jean-Louis and our friends at Active Submissions to create a website for Jimmy’s new charity Hollywood Unites For Haiti.
The idea for this much needed organization arose originally on a trip Jimmy took to his native Haiti. He was struck anew with a sense of responsibility for harnessing the connections and affluence of his new life to help struggling people in Haiti, many of whom live on less than $1 per day. As a starting point, he collected piles of used equipment from his Hollywood-based soccer club Hollywood Utd. and took it to Haiti to distribute to community organizations and local kids clubs.
More recently, he has taken fellow entertainment stars on trips to Haiti to garner their support for his cause and raise more attention in the U.S. for the plight of the Haitian people. And he has set up this wonderful charity to collect all manner of donations, both financial and equipment-based, to be used to help Haiti. He has plans to build boys and girls clubs, support sports teams, and more.
The site is straightforward, using earthy colors and a burlap-textured background, and is populated with educational information about Haiti, the charity’s leadership, and how people can help make a difference. The site is built dynamically to expand and fill any size of screen at right and left. There is a video on the home page, placed in a player that self detects the visitor’s bandwidth and serves up a stream that is customized to their web speed. We’ve added cool music from the fabulous Carole Demesmin on every page.
Long live Haiti!
Performed a major upgrade to the navigation for Six14 Productions’ portfolio website, adding a new row of tabs to the quick viewing video player and updating the look. Since Six14 shoots continuously, the samples also needed some house cleaning. We went over every category in detail, adding new material and stripping out old.
The Six14 site, which we built last year, is clean and clear with a neutral metallic background and navigation that shows off their work to best advantage. The video display technology is state of the art Javascript with a neat auto-bandwidth detection feature that automatically serves up the best quality video that the visitor’s connection can handle, a full screen video capability (just by double-clicking the screen), plus a media list by category so the user can get samples of the type of video they like best. New work can be added easily, and there’s a full featured blog as well where they can talk about their ongoing projects.
A portfolio and investor website built for Gabriel Entertainment Group, a new Hollywood production company formed by some LA heavyweights: Penny Perry, Eugene Davis, and Jonathan Kaplan. Penny’s Perry/Reece Casting company has cast over a hundred films, including dozens of hit films such as “Cocoon”, “The Hitcher,” “Ordinary People”, “Midnight Express”, “Young Guns”, “The Jerk” and “Time Cop,” as well as hundreds of popular television series.
The site includes information on the new company and Perry/Reece Casting, including team member bios, information on films in progress, and a complete work resume. The home page features a streaming movie player (showing clips from films associated with the company) that automatically detects the bandwidth of the visitor’s connection and delivers a stream that maximizes their web speed.
The navigation is drop-down style, built in CSS for speed and ease of use.
We also added childhood photos of each team member, put in hand aged borders, to spice up the bio pages.
This site was designed in partnership with our friends at Active Submissions.
Honkey tonker Grant Langston’s new website went live today, in preparation for his sixth album release. From a design standpoint, we created a straightforward, easily navigable look with some touches of country flair, placed in a color scheme that hints at old leather. The focal points are two big worn boots that appear on every page, mirroring Grant’s larger than life musical personality and real, no gimmicks songs and performances.
This is a fully featured WordPress-based music website, modern and webby in every way. It is built on the basic WordPress blogging system, but heavily hacked to allow Grant to use the administration area as a full blown content management system. Every aspect of the site is built in templates, so he can update everything easily from pictures to text to photos to calendar dates to video with no programming or coding, and no risk to damaging any page accidentally.
The home page includes a music player on the front page streaming 5 new songs, as well as automatic information streams showing his next three upcoming gigs and latest news posts. Inside, there is a calendar section that gives readers full access to information, maps, and prices, as well as an automatic gig archive that captures all past gigs. The photo section allows Grant to upload sets of photos easily and let readers view them in a high quality flash viewbox as slideshows or individual pics with captions. A news section has news about the band, a separate blog for Grant’s random thoughts, and press reviews.
In the music section, there is a full flash player with every tune he has recorded available for listening. Individual album song titles, art, and album notes are right there, and we added an ecommerce system so fans can download high quality versions of each record complete with artwork — and every penny goes to the band. Of course, links to the usual iTunes and CDBaby stores are also available too.
Best of all, the news and gig calendar sections feed into two separate RSS feeds, so fans can subscribe to them and receive updates in their email or in their bookmark bar in their browser as soon as they happen. And, last but not least, a special plugin that allows Grant to adjust the meta data on any page quick and easy so it is optimized for search engines.
A website makeover for Perceptual Healing, the company headed by aura healer Denise Godfrey and her husband Niels Krop, a life coach. Cost efficiency was a big consideration, so we kept the design to a minimum, but the functionality includes a full featured blog, a reader poll, a newsletter signup area, a for-sale audio download area, several YouTube video embeds, a lot of ecommerce, and a full time Google ad banner at top to help generate revenue from PH’s traffic.
Importantly, the site was set up as a series of templates with editable regions so Denise’s staff can edit text, images, and video in place without risking any important site coding.
A new fully featured website for performing AAA songwriter Lorie Doswell.
The art is inspired from the cd artwork and photos we created to complement her debut album, Dream Drivin’, which has nostalgic imagery of country roads, old trucks, weathered wood, and misty vistas, as well as plenty of shots of Lorie herself.
The site is built on a robust blogging platform that allows Lorie to change content easily without a programmer’s intervention, including adding gig postings, writing news items and journal-style ruminations, adding and arranging pictures in unlimited categories, and editing text parts such as her bio, links, and contact info. There is a password protected “backstage” area that she can sign into from any browser (even a cell phone) so she can update it easily from the road.
The site has RSS feed ability, so fans can add a constantly updated Doswell gig listing to their own bookmark bar with just a few clicks.
At the bottom of every page is a secure flash player (safe from prying downloaders) that plays continuously wherever you are in the site, taking the listener through some of the highlights of the album. There is also a music page where visitors can play short samples of every album track, read lyrics, and learn about the performers on each song.
A website design for a great company that helps spas sell customized gift certificates. Gets straight to the point with a product description and call to action, inviting immediate response. Color scheme uses a relaxing, theraputic palette.
Site design for a website that helps last minute gift givers give the gift of spa. Owners wanted a fun, easy to navigate site and this was the result. Gets straight to the point and makes the process very easy and fast. Color scheme is simple to draw attention to the right areas.
Added a new channel to the Six14 Productions portfolio website, for a series of GMC truck video spots featuring prominent builders. The site, which we designed and built in late 2007, employs a unique secure streaming video player that self detects the bandwidth of the visitor and serves up a stream appropriate to that user.
Six14 is sending out an email blast to all their clients promoting the new videos.
This website, which is inspired by artwork we made for his upcoming record “Collective,” features some substantial upgrades from the usual artist website. Visitors are first greeted by a quick loading animated splash page with moving clouds reflecting off Todd’s glasses (a riff off of the new record’s cover image), and a fast loading music player that plays Herfindal music continuously while the visitors peruses the site. Once inside, they are placed into the underwater world that forms the environment inside the record packaging.
For the artist, the site features a robust back end administration area that allows him to update gigs, add or reorder photos, add news items, and edit almost every page without touching a line of code. Thus, it will be quite easy and free to update and hopefully remain more current for fans. Also, we used encrypted flash players to protect Todd’s music. In this brave new world of digital distribution, this is a primary concern, as most music players seen on artist sites are easily cracked so the source files can be downloaded for free.
