I was recently approached by a librarian at Mississippi State University to make a custom website grouping together her online presence.  Librarians specialize in collections, and my job was to present her online collections in a concise and easy to navigate way.

She decided on a very simple layout, allowing the content to speak for itself.  We landed on this:

Click the picture to view the site. A very clean, straight-forward design.

I built this website on WordPress, as per usual, and custom designed the templates to allow her to easily edit the content.  I also created the mind-map and the click-map behind it, allowing users a direct gateway to all things she’d collected.

I already posted about the Customizable Worpdress Theme for Porch Swing Media, but this is for the Porch Swing Media Homepage.  This was built on the same framework as the other theme, but on this install I used it as a gathering point for all the most recent things Porch Swing Media.  I took out the graphical header, and stripped it down to the bare essentials.   I kept the Global Navigation Bar, and the footer bar from WiBiYa.

This home page for WordPress Mu is more for advertisers and as a landing page for search engines, as it mostly holds information regarding the company, advertising info, stats, and redirects to all the sub domains hosted within Porch Swing Media.

Go visit Porch Swing Media to explore the design a little more.

Leave me a comment telling me how I can make it better.  Any and all feedback is always appreciated.

Back in September 2009, I started a blog network called Porch Swing Media.  It was rooted in the idea that most of my friends are incredibly talented, and quite a few of them are writers.  I had some web know-how (SEO, interface design, web design, and just enough CSS and PHP knowledge), so we decided to try our hands at the blogosphere.  I created the platform on a WordPress Mu install, and was trying to administer 13 different sites all with different themes and feels, wading through convoluted code that wasn’t mine.  Trying to appease the writers by giving them a design they could be happy with, while juggling optimization wasn’t working out.

So I started from a blank slate.  What came out was a design that was still customizable for each blog (to a degree that still left continuity), more accurate Analytics, and a design we were all pretty content with.

I incorporated a Global Link Bar that links to all of the sites within the Porch Swing Media Blogging Network and a footer bar powered by Wibiya.  The theme automatically pulls the first image from the post, and creates an excerpt for each post automatically as well.  This feature allows my writers to focus on what they do best, writing, and keeps me from having to go back and make sure everything is working right.  If you are interested in the PHP code I used to generate these, drop me a line, and I’ll be glad to share.  This feature also gives me much more accurate Analytics results, because readers have to click on individual posts to read the full content, thereby allowing me and the writers to know which content and which SEO tactics are working the best, rather than the standard way WordPress handles content.

This theme also features a dynamic loading CSS file, that is specific to the blog you are on, allowing us to create a sense of community and brand with PSM, while still allowing each blog to be unique in its own right.

Here is a list of some of the blogs, so you can go see the theme in full force in its many different styles:

Any criticisms, upgrades or whatever are more than welcomed. Leave me a comment telling me how to make it better.

This is a flier I designed for a recent show in Houma, LA at The Boxer & The Barrel.  Three bands played of varying style: The Devil, You & Me: a folk-country 4-piece including a banjo, washtub bass, guitar and drums; Cicadas: an experimental, instrumental 2-piece; and The Jarheads: an up-and-coming rock 3-piece comprised of some guys that just graduated high school.  All three bands were excellent and it was a great time for all.

I decided to go with a Wood Type style Letterpress design, and used an image scan of an old book a friend of mine had as the background.

This is a program I designed for the Vagina Monologues Production at Mississippi State University. I incorporated the female figure, feminine color scheme and type to accentuate the pubic region of the female figure.

Gun Dog Supply is a company specializing in dog training supplies and equipment.  I worked for them for a little over a year doing web produciton, product photography, and graphic design.  These are some of the highlights from that year:

This is a redesign of the email marketing strategy for GDS.  My version was a great deal more condensed and graphical than the currently used one.  This version still lacks the call to action and increased number of featured products that I thought was necessary for an effective revamp of the E-mail marketing strategy, but one thing I’ve learned in years of client-based work, is that compromise is necessary.

These are some of the advertisements I designed for Gun Dog Supply’s advertising.  All of the dogs featured in these photographs are Steve Snell’s, and were either taken by yours truly, or Rob Snell, the other owner of Gun Dog Supply.

This chart is something I designed to highlight the features of 3 of the most popular e-collars that Gun Dog Supply sells.

Toward the end of my stint at Gun Dog Supply, we were going through the best-selling shock collars and giving them spruced up images, rather than just the plain ol’ shot of the system on a white background.

I also designed custom audio and video players to advance the Gun Dog Supply brand.  See them here:

Gun Dog Supply Custom Audio Player

Gun Dog Supply Custom Video Player

And finally, this is the world’s first (to my knowledge) online interactive e-collar.  Here the user can see exactly how this dog shock collar functions. I designed this in Adobe Flash.

Tri-Tronics Classic 70 Interactive E-Collar (Note: the Tone feature marked by “T” on the dial was recorded very poorly on an old tape recorder I found lying around the office.  This was supposed to be re-recorded in a studio, but that never happened, so it sounds pretty crappy)

When Mr. Ben Hodge and Ms. Selena Alderman decided to get hitched, they hired me on as their graphic designer for all things print involving the wedding. They decided on a theme based on Wes Anderson films, among many other things.  So we decided to incorporate the Futura font in much of the work.

The first task was the Save The Date.

After these were sent out, the invitations, RSVP cards, address labels and map were the task at hand:

For the rest of the print work, we maintained the Futura font throughout.  I incorporated Selena’s handwriting into the invitation, and we made a fun wrap-around label for the invitations.  Some of the recurring elements were used here, including the birds, and the home-made feel.

This is a product catalog layout I did for A&H Wood with a product photographer in Tupelo, MS.  The specialize in unfinished furniture, that you buy and stain yourself.  Over 100 pages of products.

These are the 2 fliers I designed for Poacher, a 4-piece band from Starkville, Mississippi.

This is a collection of concert and show fliers I designed for the band Dovecote.  An alt-country style 6-piece from Starkville, Mississippi.