I recently had the plea­sure of design­ing the per­sonal site for per­for­mance artist, Sadie Lune.

Sadie Orig­i­nally said she wanted some­thing that was “Freak Show meets Art Nou­veau”, and I imme­di­ately knew I had to make her an illus­trated header.

I did a lot of design research on freak show and cir­cus posters, as Art Nou­veau was already a well-researched aes­thetic for me.

I tried to com­bine the hand-lettered, ban­ner laden, design of the freak show poster, with the heavy line weight and real­ism of the art nou­veau poster. This was the result:

I was espe­cially pleased with the inte­gra­tion of the header and the curtains.

I also used a trans­par­ent graphic for the header, allow­ing the moon in the back­ground to show through on the page.
The moon remains sta­tion­ary, as the pic­ture of Sadie and all the con­tent below, scrolls freely.

As for the left side­bar and post head­ers, I wanted to con­tinue the retro theme and incor­po­rate an old news­pa­per feel.
I mixed up a bunch of dif­fer­ent fonts and graph­ics to try to achieve this.

There are some other nice details to the site, like the event cal­en­dar on the left; which Sadie can use to not only put new events into, but can also cre­ate new posts auto­mat­i­cally with­out hav­ing to reen­ter all the event information.

I’m also par­tic­u­larly fond of the cus­tom search bar, tes­ti­mo­ni­als, and flickr gal­leries– which update auto­mat­i­cally when Sadie updates her flickr.

I’m really happy with how the site came out!
What do you guys think?