Hey Sandra! (redesign)

Client: Sandra Leong

Project Type: Artist Portfolio

Responsible For: Art Direction, Architecture, XHMTL, CSS, CMS Integration

Software Used:
-Photoshop
-Illustrator
-skEdit

The original Hey Sandra! was one of my first live sites and, as such is very dear to my heart. However, times change, and the web is a much different place than it was. Web Standards are the order of the day, and anyone who is not designing by them whenever possible in this day and age are doing a disservice to their clients and the web as a whole. A quick look under the hood of the old site revealed a tangled mass of old techniques, namely table based layouts and frameset (ick) ... it was time for an update!

Upon discussion, we decided to use the Content Management System Textpattern as a basis for the site, thus providing Sandra with a backend system to alter the content on the site via her own admin login. All the text and links on the site are managed through the backend and are easily updateable.

For the image galleries, the raison d’etre of the site, I went with a gallery system that pulled it’s content from the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. This accomplishes two of the main goals of the site, first, since all the pictures Sandra posts to the portfolio sections on Flickr also show up in her online gallery she gets double exposure for her work (the Flickr community has a nice networking element to it, perfect for artists). Secondly, the Flickr tools through which she updates her portfolio are of a much higher quality than anything we would have been able to hack together on our alloted budget, so she gets a quick and easy way to upload and write descriptions for many new portfolio pieces at once, which encourages her to update more frequently and get her newest work seen, a double win!