Brad Frost Web

Thursday #4

This is the 4th installment of my “weekly” design project. Carrying along the same tradition as the previous design, I’m having fun arranging concentric circles in semi-irregular patterns.

Wednesday #3

This is the third installment of my “weekly” design series. I guess I should have been more realistic in regards to how consistent I would be with this project, but thankfully only a week slipped by.

Blue, orange and concentric circles are in full effect here. These are a few of my favorite things.

Monday #1

This is the beginning of (hopefully) a weekly occurrence. In an effort to set aside some quality time for creativity, I’m going to attempt to update the same PSD every week on Monday. I will add, edit, subtract, whatever to the same document and post the results. The idea is over time it will grow into something completely different than what it is today. It should be fun to watch the evolution as it grows, like one of those dinosaurs you soke in water and they get huge as they soak up the water (genius).

This is getting ambitious, but hopefully I can force myself to do this enough to want to do more pieces like this in a series and eventually have at least a couple in strong rotation.

Check back next Monday or subscribe to my RSS feed for the first revision to the above document. Comments and criticism welcome.

Designer Vs Client

The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Bonus: Clients From Hell Blog

Clients from Hell

Sliver Poetry is a collection of free verse poetry written by poet Seth Pesek.  Seth needed a simple website where he could easily add sample poems from his book and update purchasing and contact information with ease.

Wordpress was the right tool for the job and all I needed to do was create a quick skin and manipulate the default template. This site is the definition bare bones. Simplicity was the key and because of that I got a couple CSS headaches along the way.

I’m currently working on a few personal sites right now that I will post updates on when they get to the proper stage in development.

I recently had the opportunity to construct a website and blog for Ledonne Creative, a web marketing firm in Pittsburgh, PA. Ledonne Creative specializes in search engine optimization, online marketing strategies, and design. Thus the design was nicely set up for me, all I needed to do was bust out the ole’ Photoshop knives and carve it up.

The main site is all Flash, leaving the blog section to do the heavy lifting from an SEO standpoint. For the Flash end of things, I mostly used Flash’s built in tween class, and simply added some little animations for rollover states. Subtle, but effective. I also executed a PHP contact form for the site from within Flash, which was a first for me.

In regards to the blog, I simply modified the existing site design and placed it within Wordpress’ architecture. The same arrows in the Flash site were regurgitated as list bullets and title headers, and Century Gothic (not your traditional web font) was used for the titles and some of the site nav.

Since this blog will be used for SEO, I installed some of the most popular SEO plugins for Wordpress, including Headspace 2 and Google XML Sitemap Generator. Since the client knows all about optimization, these simple tools and tweaks will provide the necessary framework for the company to boost its rankings and provide some killer content.

All in all I’m quite happy results for it being a quick and dirty job. I look forward to seeing what sort of helpful SEO and design tips Ledonne Creative writes about in the near future.