As some of you might know, besides doing pattern design and illustration, I am also one-third of the design company Also. After risd, Jenny, Matt and I started the company combining our specific specialties- I am mostly the illustrator, matt is the animator and jenny the designer. Mostly we do websites or design work for small independent companies. We are responsible for some sites you may recognize- the re-design of this very site, Reform School’s site, Enfant Terrible’s site, Cartoon Brew’s blog.
Today I thought it would be fun to show you a little about how we work and take you through the process of designing the new Charmingwall site- a gallery in the West Village of NYC that sells prints of up and coming artists.
Charmingwall presented us with this logo designed by Gina Triplett. We fell in love with its handdrawn quality and the organic look of the letters.
(Jenny and Matt are actually in Chicago and I’m in Brooklyn so we use the ichat video phone as our virtual office. The entire workday Jenny’s virtual face is on my desktop and vice versa. If someone looked at me through my window they would think I am talking to myself like a crazy person all day.)
When we get a new project like this what we do first is brainstorm. The three of us (virtually) sit down and try and come up with ideas about what we think the site could look like. It didn’t take much for us to decide what we thought would be best for this site. The logo was so nice we wanted it to be big- to show it off. Because it had so many unique little parts we thought it would be nice if the whole site extended out of the logo. We came up with the idea of taking the small organic features of each letter and having them take over the rest of the logo to be a place for the content. Our conversation was probably something like- “Oh and what if the leaves exploded out and covered all the letters and then the text like popped out of it or something- yeah cool yeah and what if…” We presented our idea to the gallery owners who gave us the go ahead. They were really easy to work with and totally trusted our judgments.
We came up with something for each section by looking at the details on each letter and thinking about how something could grow out of them. Jenny and I split up the drawings that had to be done for each. Above are some of the drawings Jenny did for the about section using tracing paper over the logo.
Once all the drawings are done, Matt works his flash magic to make the drawings come to life. Above is a shot of what his flash timeline looks like. Each of the black dots at the top represent the movement in 1/24th of a second. It took a lot of animating for that location page. Here’s a little frame by frame:
We were really happy with the variety of the animations we came up with for each section. Below is a freeze frame from the store section.
Check out the site to see the results and check out all the inexpensive prints they sell from amazing artists like Evan B. Harris, Danica Novgorodoff and Treasure Frey.
