movement           author           artist           society           academic           author           home business           academia           dissertation

Client: Science & spirituality, movement

Keywords:

• peaceful
• optimistic
• intelligent

Design and build:

This website is designed to showcase factual information within a framework of spirituality. It had to appear calm, orderly, elegant, inviting, intelligent & helpful - a sense of meditation and intellectual debate within a safe welcoming environment. With this in mind, I created a white-based site with a semi-academic appearance, but handy sections to chunk information (as per self-help book layout), and balanced the cool greys with a warmer copper. The image is an armillary - a spherical astrolabe, or model of the universe. Its origins in ancient astronomy and astrology echo the central theme of the site.

Client: Alan Lyons, author

Keywords:

• IMPACT: powerful, best seller, authority
• commercial fiction, mainstream
• spiritual, liberal
• modern, future, contemporary
• big events

Design & build:

The site echoes the look-and-feel of Alan Lyons’s book covers and elements of their design. The colours were chosen to reflect the strong spiritual aspect of his main trilogy and appeal to men and women equally, while the contrast and bold design match the high-impact events of his books. The website also has a matching blog, to be launched shortly.

Client: Lin Kerr, artist

Keywords:

• contemporary
• elegant
• welcoming
• lively

Design advice & build:

The design was a collaboration with the artist: I advised on format, layout conventions, and navigation styles; she drafted designs in Photoshop. I then built final designs from her drafts, converted them to the html, and built the site. The main priorities were to showcase the range of her work without the different colours and designs overpowering each other, and to make the site easily navigable for potential buyers, clients, and students.

Client: Oxford Scribes, calligraphy society

Keywords:

• Oxford blues
• restrained elegance / fun energy
• traditional & established / modern & up-to-date

Design, build, and training:

This website was for an Oxford-based artists' society, using their calligraphic logo. The brief was to incorporate Oxford imagery, the traditional Oxford blues, and a sense of both the gravitas and liveliness of their society. Artists' work needed to be promiment, navigation had to be user-friendly for the less computer-literate members, and the content needed to be easy for the society to update. I also trained 2 society members to web-master the site and they are now running it.

Client: Richard Webster, academic

Keywords:

• rich, warm colours
• “leather study” feel
• simplicity
• gravitas

Design:

These draft designs were created for the website of an academic specialising in pyschoanalysis, philosophy, politics, and religion. With approximately 200 pages in the original site, orderly navigation of sections and sub-sections was essential. The wealth of material needed to be showcased without the volume of links overwhelming the reader, and as well as sub-section links the design includes space for related topics from other sections and external links. Printer-friendly pages were also designed for those who preferred to read off-screen.

Client: Olivia Knight, author

Keywords:

• literary erotica
• mystery
• sophistication
• medievalism

Design & build:

The look-and-feel was created around the cover of Olivia Knight’s novel, with sufficient flexibility to accommodate the colours of further books and a specific proviso to avoid all purple and pink. The design for most pages, including books, articles, and reviews, needed to be user-friendly for her to expand as further work was published.

Client: Ali Mack, bag designer

Build:

I built this site in conjunction with a designer, Tessa Case, who created the designs in Photoshop layers. From these, I extracted the images, created the repeating background, drew the layout sizing, and built the css styles. (Other images, including the gallery thumbnails and high-resolution versions, I created on Photoshop from the designer’s photographs.) As with many of my sites, this site uses a mixture of fixed and floating layout, to stay as true as possible to the original design on a variety of screen sizes.

Personal project: academic site, Post-structuralism

A sub-site on my personal website, Post-structuralism: its basis and notions is divided into two parts, playing around with how hypertext could explore and reflect the academic theory as well as presenting it. Part One is rigid, hierarchicial, and empirical: it offers a brief introduction to post-structuralism's linguistic basis in five short sentences, with the option to drop-down an explanation and/or a relevant excerpt from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Part Two is dispersed and associative, refusing to privilege any text or create totalising arguments: it showcases various notions around post-structuralism, presented as a galaxy of signifiers and using texts from, among others, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. Sprinkled with coloured links, "it has no beginning; it is reversible; one accesses it through multiple entrances of which none can be confidently called the main entrance; the codes that it mobilises appear on the horizon as far as the eye can see, they are undecidable (the text never submits to a decisive principle other than a throw of the dice)..." (Barthes, 1970: 11, from S/Z, my translation).

Personal project: academic site, Who are we now? Hypertext fiction & western world views

An earlier website, this was created in 2000 as my Honours dissertation for University of Cape Town, South Africa, and was presented in part at the World Wide Web 2000 conference at Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg. Its central tenets are that "Postmodernism represents a shift in the collective unconscious of the western world which hypertext fiction can help to consolidate" and "Jung's reading of alchemy illuminates this process of transformation." As with Post-structuralism, this site lightly plays the theory against the hypertext. Most of its navigation is hierarchical and orderly, following academic requirements, allowing the user to drill down to further explanations - but occasionally twisting the meaning of a link or assertion in so doing. The fifth part, by contrast, wrests control from the user to navigate them through the alchemical "process of transformation".

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