Worked on the layout and illustration for this custom face-building for my good friends at USN

Check it out here: RedBull Me

Site (design) template I did for Edvec Japan.

About 3 months passed before I could get this project finished, after a few hours here and many hours there, it was finally done. A lot of the main text on the site are images, I did this to make the site look pretty on windows, where fonts are not rendered so smoothly. However, upon checking the source code of the site, can see that actually the text really is there – it’s replaced with a trick – this means that screen readers and google can still get on with the site.

Ramping up the campaigns for traffic and customers, the site also runs in both English and Japanese.

Come have a look: facemakr

Meat & Wool New Zealand were looking to re-fresh their website, and rely on the great team at Eat Creative to make that wish a reality. The new website is born!

Taking a “from the ground up” approach and realising that now the brand has been furthered in the Japanese territory, it was time to evaluate the existing website (which I built a couple of years back).

While browsing some of the new photography, I came to think it would be nice to have these beautiful large pictures in the background instead of pictures contained inside the design — kind of inside-out design if you will. This is the real base for the overall site, from the information pages to the recipes right down to the terms and conditions pages. The rest of the design flowed from this simple choice — based on our “house” grid.

This redux also called for a new way to run the site, so we chose drupal as the final base. Working with this structure has allowed us to add features we would otherwise think twice about including. So far it’s been a pleasure, thanks to the wizardry of Erik Johansson.

Now back by a cookery campaign for it’s launch on all the major Japanese cookery websites, we are keeping our fingers crossed for a definite hit.

So if you can read Japanese, and like beef or webdesign, come have a look!

New Zealand Meat & Wool( J )

JMEC (Japan Market Expansion Competition) needed a new website to communicate their objectives to a wider audience, as well as providing tools for their applicants. We delivered.

JMEC say it best themselves:

I was responsible for the architecture, site design and front end coding in this case. We wrapped the resulting mix over Drupal to serve the site. JMEC are very happy with the result and if you yourself fancy taking the course, apply here!

Many thanks to Erik Johansson as always.

Travelling (and filming in) 9 different countries in 30 days, the 21 Foundation were after a perfect solution to showcase the adventure and spark debate.

Several months ago, we were approached to create a resource for distributing information about new ways of thinking – for teachers and students alike – following the notion that children studying now, will be using different tools in the future. Doing jobs that don’t even exist yet. 21 Foundation exists to be help children be taught in more flexible manner to help them better cope with the unknown. A kind of drive for “out with the old, in with the new”.

Currently the website offers such a forum for adding links to interesting content, the teaser trailer for the movie and a blog charting the adventure. Additional elements will be added in the none-to-distant future.

Programming by Erik Johansson.

The website runs bi-lingually in Japanese and English. You can find it here: http://tedxtokyo.com/blog/

Various videos and other information will be added to the site after the event.

I tried to emulate the official TED website as much as possible with the design, using their classic red and white colour scheme. As we’ll probably end up with all sorts of videos I simply opted for a black box to contain them, instead of a fancy player as seen on the TED site.

For those not aquatinted with TED, this quote from their website should clarify things:

There are numerous videos on the TED site which can be watched for free, from the likes of Bill Gates, Al Gore, J.J. Abrams, Tim Berners-Lee & Richard Dawkins to name but a few.

Many thanks to Erik Johansson.

Based in various countries, Spectro specialise in high end spectro-analysis equipment. This equipment is used in laboratories and on site at the work place where analysis of metals is required.

Working from a rough guideline of the new global site draft, we created all the templates and design for the Japanese site from scratch. The site is fully standards compliant as always.

Eat’s new website is released, with a focus on; simplicity, style & standards. It also comes in 5 fresh eye-pleasing colours!

Starting from today, Eat boasts a new website, where you can find out about Eat’s clients – the work Eat does – some insight into Eat’s previous life as a magazine and staff profiles. All without being bogged down by pointless flash intros and text you’ll never read. We separated the wheat from the chaff.

Eat Creative

If you’ve ever tried to make something for the company you work for, then you’ll understand the various internal hoop-jumping that goes hand in hand with that process. Internal projects often have a much longer timeframe than client projects. So, one year after I join Eat, we have our new website!

Cutting back with a lot of fancy bells and whistles, the aim of this site was to make something clean that would stand the test of time both aesthetically and technically. Take the client pages for example; we created a system that ‘reads’ how long an image strip is, applies the code automatically. So adding a new image is simply a case of editing the original and placing it back on the server. Our code figures out the rest. When filtering the type of work we do, various icons fade gracefully out of view.

Rounded corners and custom fonts are handled with similar grace. Technically this site is above par, but let me offer a wider design and usability perspective: The site is navigated with 3 simple menu options, opening up the content fluidly. So simple but a complete nightmare to get right, take too much away and you get total mystery, add too much and you get confusion. A fourth section was planned with a blog, video etc called ‘gorogoro’. Currently this is planned as a phase 2 (although the chances are!)

Eat’s top page is devoid of flashy intros, I went for a single large logo and a brief statement about Eat. To refine like this has always been my intention in all websites I create. Seeing this clearly takes a lot of perseverance and persuasion to go out on what is often perceived as a whim. I’m glad we did.

Previously, the old website suffered from being way too advanced for the job. A built in update system that never got used, stripped down to it’s bare essentials but also creating an information overload. The new website learns from the old, and offers people eye-candy with easy to read information that almost jumps off the screen into the eyes.

Achieving easy to read text on the internet is a combination of font size and juxtaposition. Text needs to breathe. So I made special instructions to the editors to give me text that has been formatted in this manner.

For the Photography I erected a small studio in the office, shooting with my trusty post-war dSLR the Nikon D1h. A few people had to do without their desk lamps for my makeshift lighting rig during that time, sending them into consummate darkness – how very romantic – as this image illustrates.

So there you have it, Eat’s flagship to the world, offering both the best in communication and technical build. Many thanks to Erik, and everyone else involved.