SadieMain

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:

Sadie Lune_1264413562260

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?

January 29th, 2010 | Design, Web | 3 Comments

ThisIsStar Relaunch!

Oh my god!

After months and months of draw­ing and cod­ing, This Is Star has a new look!

I’ve been doing a lot of code and design on other people’s web­sites for the past cou­ple months, and it occurred to me that a new look on my own site was way over­due.
The pre­vi­ous design had been stand­ing strong for just over 2 years, and I knew it was more than time for a change.

The new site has some neat fea­tures that I’ll share with you now.

Cus­tom Cat­e­gory Headers

I designed the site to skin the head­ers of var­i­ous posts, by cat­e­gory.
This way, when I make an audio post, it calls a header illus­tra­tion with a cello bow and a micro­phone.
I have sim­i­lar head­ers for sev­eral dif­fer­ent types of posts, and plan on adding more as my col­lec­tion of post top­ics grows.

DefaultHeader
AudioHeader
PhotoHeader
IlloHeader

I was inspired by the man­ner in which sites like Tum­blr aut­o­for­mat your posts by type, and I wanted to do some­thing sim­i­lar on my site, which is word­press based.
Chang­ing the header back­ground dynam­i­cally by cat­e­gory seemed like the sim­plest way for me to get this feel with­out going overboard.

Fun with JavaScript

See­ing as I’ve grown a lot as a devel­oper in the time that has gone by since I did my last site design, I thought I should show off some of my newer skills.
One of those skills is using JavaScript, which has become much more sim­ple and dynamic in recent years thanks to the rise of libraries like JQuery and YUI.

I used JQuery on my site to make a few neat effects that I’ll show you here:

adexpand

If you click on one of the “Adver­tise Here” but­tons on the right hand side, you’ll notice that the infor­ma­tion on pur­chas­ing ad space on the site expands below the ads.
This allows me to dis­play the infor­ma­tion with­out adding an unnec­es­sary extra page, or allow­ing the user to nav­i­gate away from the main content.

Tis_hover

If you hover over my logo on the top left, you’ll see that it ani­mates slightly.
The lovely logo is, of course, designed by the equally lovely Nubby Twiglet.

collapsingArchives

You’ll also notice that all my archive pages and cat­e­gories will expand using a col­laps­ing menu.
This is pow­ered by Col­laps­ing Archives, and Col­laps­ing Cat­e­gories plu­g­ins, respectively.

Dynamic Footer

sweetFooter

A web design trend I’ve seen pop­ping up a whole lot lately is putting lots of dynamic con­tent for social net­work­ing in your footer.
I really like the look of these big foot­ers anchor­ing everyone’s pages, so I decided to do my own ver­sion, inte­grat­ing design ele­ments from my cat­e­gory head­ers, as well as the site header.

I hope all of you like the new site design as much as I do!

November 12th, 2009 | Announcements, Design, Illustration, Web | 13 Comments

I’ve recently been work­ing on a cou­ple of web design col­lab­o­ra­tions with
the impec­ca­ble Miss Nubby Twiglet.
She is eas­ily the best designer I’ve ever had the plea­sure of col­lab­o­rat­ing with.
She has been at the helm of visual design on these projects,
while I’ve con­cen­trated on code and inter­ac­tion design.
I’ve had so much fun cod­ing up Nubby’s designs and mak­ing her ideas become reality.

Biore­quiem

Biorequiem

Most recently, we spent some time work­ing on redesign­ing Biore­quiem,
the online home of Miss Zoet­ica Ebb.

Zo was look­ing for a clean, sim­ple design, with lots of dynamic ele­ments.
The things I’m most proud of on this site are invis­i­ble– the way the side­bars update with recent posts and gen­er­ate thumb­nails on the fly, and the gal­leries auto­mat­i­cally inte­grate new con­tent when it is added– with­out a need for fur­ther cod­ing.
I’m also totally in love with the logo Nubby designed for the top header!

iCiNG

iCiNG

A few months ago, we launched the new face of iCiNG, Gala Darling’s fash­ion & lifestyle site.
Nubby incor­po­rated the illus­tra­tion I did of Gala’s crown logo into her fan­tas­tic mag­a­zine lay­out nav­i­ga­tion header.
From Nubby’s mock­ups, I inte­grated the design into Gala’s con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem and blog software.

This project was the start of my web work with Nubby, and I expect there to be many more col­lab­o­ra­tive web design efforts in store for the two of us!
Keep your eyes peeled!

September 18th, 2009 | Design, Web | 8 Comments

A tornado disguised as a girl.

Love & Not Trouble.
Illustration & Animation.
Web Design, Cello, & World Domination.


The sexiest female Tom Waits impersonator ever!
David Gallaher, High Moon

A deft eye for color and palate.
Chris Arrant, Newsarama

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ThisIsStar.com is the blog and portfolio of Star St.Germain, an illustrator, designer, developer and musician.
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