Patchrobe

The site re-design and port to Drupal of paulneillphotography.com is now completed, once again using Drupal + Views Slideshow + CCK + ImageCache + Framework. You can see the results at http://www.paulneillphotography.com

There were some minor technical challenges - the glow when mousing over the image thumbnails was created using jQuery to add a mouseover event to all images of the thumbnail class that rewrote the imagecache directory in the path to one where the image preset was slightly brightened. A particularly satisfactory one-liner solution that pleased our inner unix sys admin no end.

The design here, however, is the star using the original design elements of damask/arabesque ornaments, distressed blue leather and a script style logo (though we used an actual scan of Paul's signature instead of a calligraphic font).

The blue leather effect was quite a lot of fun to create. Though it was easy to find very nice leather background tiles (one of which was desaturated, brightened and had the contrast dropped considerably to form the background of this i.e. Patchrobe's, web site's new design) it was impossible to find a distressed leather pattern that already tiled. Eventually a suitable distressed leather image was distorted so that the leather grain was more even, x- and y-offset by 50% to create the tiling capability and a 30% opaque irregular brush used with the clone stamp tool to remove the hard edges and smooth out some tonal variations that would have made the tile obvious. I have attached the distressed leather tile should anyone wish to re-use it as both monochrome suitable for colourising and the blue I eventually used. Attribution to Dan Dissanayake of Patchrobe Limited would be nice, as would a mail to dan@patchrobe.com if you use it somewhere interesting :-)

The stamp background to represent different countries was also a minor creative struggle.

All in all I'm delighted with the results as a graphic design portfolio piece and the ease with which functionality and layout changes was particularly satisfactory. Long gone are the days when I would have spent hours puzzling over how to move a main content element to the right sidebar in code - CSS positioning to the rescue!