This was an interesting one!

Having designed an individual restaurant site for Serafina and Cicchetti separately, both under the same ownership and management, the owner now wanted an “umbrella” to wrap the two sites together. This was useful especially given that much of the information, such as contact info, is shared between the two restaurants.

I opted for a design that would allow the branding information to stay fixed at the top of each page, not scrolling out of view on longer pages. To achieve this, I implemented a custom scrollbar, allowing only the content area of longer pages to scroll. You have to see it in action to appreciate this function (Note: if you have a large monitor, you might need to size your monitor down to initialize the scrollbars).

There is also a persistent navigation menu that is available on every page of the umbrella site, Serafina’s site, and Cicchetti’s site, while the two restaurants each have their own navigation menu as well. The idea with this was to make it styled simply (a black vertical bar with white text), both so it would create good contrast with the other sites, yet not clash.

Mixed Greens is run by two serious photographers and foodies, and they are competing with some pretty sophisticated websites for attention on the internet. There old format wasn’t cutting it, so they asked me to redesign it.

We kept enough flavor from the old design (same logo and masthead, white background, bright green links) to make sure their existing readership would not be overly shocked by the new layout. However, we added some features that simply did not exist before.

Previously, the website had a typical blog structure, where the 10 most recent stories simply chained up on the homepage, creating a very long page, and access to only 10 of hundreds of articles the owners have written on local, sustainable food. The new design creates an engaging way to present dense amounts of information as is typical of newspaper and magazine websites: there is a short teaser and thumbnail for many of the stories, with a headline for dozens of others. This allows access to 39 stories on the homepage, while still not feeling visually overwhelming.

The new site also features a slick photo gallery to show off their work. The site owners have the ability to upload their own photos to the gallery. Since this is accomplished with Wordpress, they have no fear of “breaking” the layout.

Cicchetti is the sibling restaurant to Serafina, whose website I also designed. The owner wanted a very different feel for this restaurant, as it is a more casual yet modern style of establishment.

Cicchetti’s site features striking photography which expands to fill the background of each page, no matter the size of the viewer’s monitor. The branding at the top is fixed in place by implementing a scrollbar to allow only the content to be scrolled out of view.

Fred Arcala is partner in a Seattle law firm that specializes in immigration law. He wanted a site that had iconic American motifs, yet still appeared professional. I designed a masthead with the Statue of Liberty, and infused the palette of the site with blues and burgundies.

Fred also wanted to be able to add content himself, especially to add informative articles in the form of Frequently Asked Questions, and to be able to create links to sites he found that would be useful for his clients. I set up the site on Wordpress, making it very easy for Fred to add his own content.

Yoram Bauman, the world’s first and only Stand-Up Economist, had a challenge for me: could I help him condense the information from three websites into one? And could it also look appropriate for both a comedian and an Econ professor?

Yoram had been juggling lots of information between three different websites, and he wanted to make his life easier. He also wanted something that had enough personality to share his comic side, while remaining serious enough to support his often complex insights into economics. Oh, and he also wanted to start blogging. Stand-Up Economist: The Website (Version 2) was born.

Kara had heard about Joomla Content Management System from a colleague and asked me to build her website in Joomla.

Joomla provides a robust back end for a site owner to be able to implement updates and changes.

The design of this site features natural foliage which expands and shrinks to frame the site no matter the size of the user’s monitor.

Brad Peterson Baseball Academy has an information heavy site. Brad has a lot of offerings for young players, and I designed the site make it easy to provide updates in the various areas that would appear on the homepage.

There is also a basic implementation of Paypal to sell his baseball clinics and seminars. There is no monthly fee for the basic version of Paypal, and for a business selling only a handful of items, it is a great way to start taking online payments.

Serafina Osteria is a famously romantic Italian restaurant, and in redesigning their site I wanted to convey a sense of the ambience: dark and candlelit. A warm palette of browns, deep reds and golds is accented by a flicker of candlelight glow at the upper left and lower right corners of each page.

Serafina is a robust restaurant, offering lunch, dinner, brunch, late night meals, happy hour, an extensive cocktail list, and an enormous wine list. They also feature cocktail and wine tastings, quarterly wine dinners, a beautiful print newsletter they wanted to archive on the site, and a live jazz calendar. I was able to organize all of this info into a neat, intuitive (and space-saving!) drop down navigation menu, while overall keeping the site uncluttered and inviting.