client :: BabyBrowns.com
An online baby boutique specializing in:
designer diaper bags, designer baby furniture, baby gear, baby gifts, nursery decor, and more

Troy and Bethany Beaver purchased BabyBrowns.com in Fall 2011 and wanted a new identity and website for the store. They shared ideas they had for their baby boutique’s new look with me, and we put together concepts for their new identity. We also created business card, letterhead and envelope templates. And then moved on to the design of the site, and building the design into a BigCommerce template. Plus, I created a matching WordPress theme design for the BabyBrowns.com Blog. Overall, it was a very fun project. I had always wanted to do a design for a baby boutique, and I couldn’t have had better clients. Troy & Bethany are amazing people and were fabulous to work with.

:: The identity ::

:: The website ::

:: The Blog ::

Some fun things done on this project for extra flair (with JavaScript)

• An image on the homepage (under main content section) that will randomly change on page load/refresh
• A featured slideshow that displays actual text, with drop-shadows, button navigation & hover title
• Featured product carousel slider at bottom of store homepage

BabyBrowns.com has some really gorgeous baby stuff. Their designer diaper bags don’t even look like diaper bags! Their nursery bedding makes me wish I could sleep in a crib. Their kids’ bedding for twin & full beds is fabulous as well. And they have Bella Bands, which I could not live without during my last two pregnancies. I just wish I had found them sooner. So go check out BabyBrowns.com, because they are truly a unique baby boutique & carry a rockstar supply of baby stuff!

See the live site → BabyBrowns.com

I love working with beauty companies, so I was super excited to work with Nickola Jones, of Natural World Essentials, Inc., in the design and development of a new e-commerce website. Nickola makes amazing bath & body products that are natural & nourishing to skin. She wanted a web design that conveyed a “natural” look, so I took her logo & ideas and integrated them to make her vision a reality. After the design phase, I converted the design into HTML/CSS with some JavaScript, and then integrated that into a template for Volusion – which sounds a lot easier than it really was [I'll save my review on Volusion for another post]. With the design in place, I added the categories, products, photos, and content [as Nickola had selected at the beginning of the project]. And then, it was time to go LIVE.

See the live site → naturalworldessentials.com

When I first met Amanda, she was making a big transition. She had decided to close her shop, 29 & Co., and start a blog where she could share her ideas & awesome products she had found. As we talked more about her project, and she showed me different sites she liked, I knew this was going to be a fun project. And when she said the name was potterlime, immediately black & white with splashes of lime jumped to my mind. Of course, she was also thinking of those same colors. So with our brains pretty much in synch, I got to work on her logo…

Once I had her logo finished, I used it as inspiration for the rest of the site’s design. The site’s design came together fairly quickly. I drew a lime with some swirls that I positioned to always appear at the bottom right of the website. I added a few fun, lime-colored accents, like the lime “go” button on the search area & the little birdie in the latest tweets section. Another fun thing I added was during the actual coding phase of the project, with the featured post slider.

In the end, I had a blast working on the project & was very pleased with the result…

See the live site → potterlime.com

Amanda also had me make her a matching twitter background [note: this was before twitter changed their layout, so this background is now hard to see on smaller screens when logged into twitter]

See Amanda’s twitter page → twitter.com/potterlime

Syreeta is a Zumba instructor in Charlotte, North Carolina, and wanted a website to feature her upcoming classes, Zumba news, photos and videos and an online store filled with Zumba merchandise. I had so much fun working with Zumba Diva Syreeta on this project – she has introduced me to the world of Zumba & I can’t wait to get my Zumba on!

See the live site → getyourzumbaon.com

An interesting change of pace from the usual feminine design, designing & developing jeffcoles.com was a fresh & fun experience. This was one of the most masculine designs I’ve done so far. Some of my favorite things are:

• the text-graphic for the site’s name & tagline
• the use of sketch fonts as headers in sidebar
• the grungy facebook & twitter buttons
• the form to sign up to receive blog updates via email is styled in a fill-in-the-blank format
• the striped-gradient-to-solid background on the category links (in the sidebar)

Ok, so I have lots of favorites…

In addition to the stuff I mentioned above, I also added Recent Posts to the sidebar & Jeff’s latest tweets. And I used the fabulous Thesis framework for WordPress.

See the live site → jeffcoles.com

Jeff Coles is a Commerical Real Estate Broker in Bethesda, MD. You can read more about him at his blog: Jeff Coles, The Apartment Broker.

Author Tina McAllister approached me about a one page site design for her book, Gina Agnes. I read Gina Agnes a year ago, so I was really excited to work with Tina on this project. Gina Agnes is the story of a girl who was found as a baby in a pew, at Saint Agnes Catholic Church, & is raised by three nuns & Father Gerard.

I used colors from the cover as a starting point & created a couple different layouts. For one of the designs, I illustrated a Catholic Church. For the other design, I created my first hand lettering design, inspired by the incredibly talented Jessica Hische. I drew both the Church illustration & the hand lettering with pencil & paper, and then I traced the designs in Illustrator.

Once Tina saw the hand lettered design, she immediately knew that it was the design for ginaagnes.com. I developed the simple one page site with the Headway framework for WordPress.

See the live site → ginaagnes.com

When author Tina McAllister approached me about a one-page design for her latest book, Woof! The Book, I jumped at the opportunity. Working with Tina McAllister is always a pleasure, as we seem to have very similar tastes in design. And when she said she wanted me to illustrate the main character for her book, I was over the moon!

Woof! The Book is the story of Vivi, a wife & mother, who has completely let herself go, until she discovers the world of Botox & other beauty treatments. In the book, Vivi gets a complete makeover from head to toe, so I needed to illustrate Vivi both “before” & “after”.

I started with designing the “after” illustration of Vivi. However, my first illustration turned out too young…

So, I started over. This time, I was much happier with Vivi’s “after” illustration, so I manipulated it to produce the “before” illustration.

However, Vivi’s “before” illustration wasn’t messy enough & her “after” was too simple, so some details were added to both illustrations…

Some stains were added to Vivi's pants & untied shoelaces to her tennis shoe.

Some bling was added to Vivi's shirt & a ring & bracelet to accessorize her outfit. Plus, her lip color was changed to match her blouse with some glossy highlights.

However, Vivi’s “before” illustration still looked too clean, and Vivi’s lips in the “after” needed a tad more gloss…

Once the “before” & “after” illustrations of Vivi were finalized, the rest of the single web page design came together very quickly…

See the live site → woof-thebook.com