I will also be moving my blog over to there soon and hope to actually start posting.

why can’t we have a 28 hour day? That would be nice.

We started out organizing some of the content and restructuring some of the sections of the site. We considered several design styles, from a very rich textured layout to a very clean white design reminiscent of a newspaper. The design we chose in the end took elements from both, maintaining a very clean layout and organization but incorporating some textured elements that represent the period. With wide vivid images and jQuery animation to rotate images on the homepage the design much better represents the Renaissance Festival and all that it offers.

Visit the site at http://www.larf.net

But what is most important is not just how improved the site looks, but the results that we’ve already seen. Besides tons of positive feedback from the site’s visitors, the analytics show that the new design is pulling visitors in more and keeping them on the site longer. Just two weeks after the site launched the Bounce Rate dropped to 29% from 39% two weeks prior on the old design. The Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who visited the site and then immediately left without browsing anything else. Kind of a “bail out percentage”.  Also the average time spent on the site went from 3:12 to 4:42 seconds showing that visitors to the site are staying on the site for more time. And while visiting the site they viewed an average of 5.01 pages per visit on the new site we designed versus 3.24 pages per visit before. As you can see, across the board the site’s performance is improved.

This is a design for a site currently in development as of July 2009. The site is for a real estate development in Baton Rouge Louisiana and by using panoramic photos and a wide open layout the visitor is brought into the real estate development rather than the real estate brought into a box on the visitor’s screen.

This highly graphical style showcases the beauty of the development and sets a tone throughout the site that matches the lifestyle of the home development created by the real estate developer.

For the July 2008 cover of Living Magazine, I was asked to create a cover for the featured story about Hood Northlake Chevrolet’s new dealership in Covington, Louisiana. The cover had to feature the new building, but also work as the July issue with a patriotic feel and fit within the magazine’s demographic.

A soft macro shot of the American flag was chosen as well as a great photo of the new building that was not overpowering yet showed the off the new dealership. The final cover shows a Chevrolet vehicle for sale, a photostrip of other Chevy vehicles all, surrounded by stars and stripes.

It’s pretty easy, but I had a hard time finding tutorials so hopefully this will help someone get started:

1) Take your node.tpl.php file and save it as node-your_content_type_name.tpl.php. If you don’t have a node.tpl.php file you need to create one and place it in your theme directory or Drupal won’t detect the content type specific template. What I did was copy the node template from the Garland theme and then thin it down some.

2) You need to empty your site Cache, go to Site Config –> Performance and dump the cache, then visit the Site Building -> Themes page to get Drupal to read your theme files. This makes sure that it knows the new template files are there. I’ve had kind of a mixed bag with this, sometimes I’ve had to do it, sometimes not, but if you node template isn’t being applied, give this a try.

3) Now, we need to figure out what fields to call and how to call them into your node template. You’re also probably going to want to wrap them in some div columns or whatever you need to setup the layout the way you want.

to print all of your fields you can use this code:

print all nodes:

 <pre style="background:#eee;border:1px solid black;clear:both;">
<?php print_r($node) ?></pre>

Then you can call any of the pieces of the array for each field, like this:

<?php print $node->field_thename[0]['view'] ?> 

• Print tells it to print what follows
• then we call the cck field that we want
• the [0] specifies the item in the array, if you have multiple entries, such as images all attached to the same imagefield you could call the 2nd with [1] or the third with [2] and so on.
• the last piece I believe is called the field particle… “view” seems to work for me to render the content like it should be. Pretty much like how it puts the content in just a normal template. Some other “particles” to try are: ['safe'] ['value']

But you can also call other “particles” of data that is in the array. Look below at how I build an image tag for example by calling each piece.

call path to image and build img tag:

   <img src="<?php print base_path() . $field_banner[0]['filepath']; ?>"
              width="<?php print $field_banner[0]['data']['width']; ?>"
              height="<?php print $field_banner[0]['data']['height']; ?>"
              alt="<?php print $field_banner[0]['data']['alt']; ?>" 

I hope this helps someone building a Drupal theme.

What They Needed:
Dr. Stewart opened his own practice in August-September of 2008 and needed an online presence. The site is currently in progress and will be launching soon.

Perpetual Redesign Hell

I spent the better part of 10 months redesigning my site and branding, never quite sure if I was done and always pushing the project to the back burner because client work comes first. So in May I got tired of looking at the old site, which was full of content, but not representative of my abilities as a designer and I decided to delete it all and move this site from development to live. It was not finished, and really it still isn’t but I knew that pushing it live with problems and missing pieces would be the only way I’d force myself to find the time to get it completed.

Missing work

And now, a few months after I launched it, I’m realizing how much of my work from my old portfolio is missing. When I launched this site in May I had only entered one website into my portfolio section, the rest was print work. Web design is my specialty so to only have one piece was not very good to say the least.

I’ve been working the past few weeks late a night to enter more pieces from my portfolio. Some of it is work from many years ago, some from clients, some from places I’ve worked, some freelance and some from my time as a student. What’s hard now is to go through all of my work, (find it first!) and decide what to include. There is a lot of work, and some of it is now outdated and shows it’s age, but I feel it is important to show some older pieces because it shows the history I have in the field.

So what do you think? Is it a good idea to include older work… to establish that history and chain of experience or is it better to show less and only show the most recent or best work of your career?

This piece from 2007 is a natural, eco-friendly packaging solution and logo I designed for a beauty products company: H-Red. This paper and wood packaging makes use of organic and vine-like designs with a earth-tone color palette.

This was a bit of a personal project. I like to paint, and while I do paint sometimes on canvas with a real brush, I enjoy very much to paint digitally. I like to create large, high resolution space paintings. These are the kinds of illustrations that are part science and part fantasy.

I was asked to put together a quick site to showcase some of the techniques I use so that students could follow along. I decided to use some pieces and cropped shots of various space paintings as the graphics of the site. Many of the images are screenshots of work that was in progress at the time.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La needed a website to showcase their joint efforts to offer a Doctor of Education degree to their students. Because both universities were supplying components of the degree program, the website and branding had to be visually different from either university so as to maintain a balance between the two.

The original site that much of the content came from was a one page, awful site with no organization of content, and a layout that was hard to understand and read for visitors. I took all of the content and reorganized it into a better presentation that is easier to read and navigate.

Web site design for a non-profit organization from 2007. The site and branding were all created to work together to represent children and families that are in the midst of separation of other problems that the organization assists.