In the last couple of months I’ve put together a couple of sites, mostly coding other people’s design or tweaking WordPress templates to fit a client’s needs. This site for Gen110 was designed by the fine folks at 4040 in Berkeley, and handed to me to make build out. I learn a lot from working for other designers, and their thought process is excitingly different from my own. I like their boldness, and obvious love of the history of graphic design. When you work well with classical ideas, your work is instantly classical.

I also designed and built a site for my friend Z, at zscrossing.com. She goes to more shows than anybody you’ll ever meet in your life and loves a huge range of music. The idea was to focus on a few simple graphic elements and choice fonts, then let her posts speak for themselves.

And finally, I just wrapped up coding the new site for openmarketing.com. They’ve been working with another designer in SF, who came up with their excellent racetrack logo, and wanted to incorporate their graphics into a WordPress theme. Most of what I did on this site was tweak code and make things work. They as a company have a strong sense of what they want, which some people might dislike, but I love it. One of the downsides to living in California is that people don’t express strong opinions, especially if they sound like “no”.  Marcia at Open Marketing has the courage of her convictions, which makes her easy to work with.

Coming up in the next couple of months for me: finishing the film, obviously, and then the packaging for it. Most of that will be outlined over on the film’s site, but I’ll check back in here to post other work. Up first, however, is rebuilding Jane’s site in a more flexible way that shows off her work better. Perhaps I’ll even finally get around to redesigning this site…

Expanding on the graphic themes of fascism that are this band’s milieu, I wanted to do something that was photographic, but very geometric and architectural. Something imposing, classical, but generic – it could be a bank, it could be a theatrical hall, it could be a palace. Or, it could be a mausoleum. Andre wanted to keep things simple, with a duotone style, which suits the graphic lingo of fascism and is fun to work with. He wanted to show off the new flags which he designed as well.

As a designer, I can’t help but love the big 12″ wrapper that records come in, and the potential that has for striking imagery. In all of this, though, I’m very proud of the small detail in the concrete over the door, which I modified so that it says G-M-O, or G’Mo, which is the way the band name often gets shortened in emails etc. A pet name.

Note that the center label doesn’t have an A or B side, again fitting with the utilitarian quality of a lot of this design (which was a guiding principle in both the CD and 7″ packaging).

The back cover is a very dark, subtle photo of the flag, flattened out into the green tinted photo. Your monitor won’t do it justice, so if you want to see it you should buy a copy.

And it’s work I don’t like doing – it’s dull, repetitive, and unengaging. Using WordPress, this is not the case – the repetitive bits are only done by me once, then WordPress takes over the repetitive part.

I’m glad to see that I’m not alone in this (and that one of my sites got linked):
http://creatingwebsuccess.com/web-site-redesign/18-reasons-to-use-wordpress-for-your-blog-or-non-blog-web-site/