New Year, New Identity, New Site

NOTE: If you don’t care to read about some of the brief details regarding my new site and brand, please give me a quick record of your visit by leaving a comment at the bottom. Thanks.

Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for stopping by. I’m honored by your visit here as a lot of work has gone into the start of this new year.

I had a great 2010 having moved into my first studio in the West End of Greenville. Now we are in the beginning stages of building out a 2200 square foot space that I hope to move into around the beginning of February. My current space is basically a production office. The new space will have all the features of a full featured commercial studio including several shooting areas, a large cyc wall and everything else that I need regularly to produce the work I’m doing these days.

With all the change I wanted to create a new identity and site that felt more cohesive than what I’ve had in the past. So, here it is. Some have seen it, but I’m sure it will be new to many of you.

Identity

When I first started my company, everything was organized under my LLC name, Greene Photographs. At that point I created a nice, overall identity that felt consistent from Business Card to Website / Blog etc. When I changed my website to just use my name, I just kind of hacked it and didn’t really go through the whole design process again. It lacked a cohesive feeling and was probably confusing for those I gave business cards, etc.

So, first, the new identity.

I decided to go with a simple word mark logo with a two color scheme. Ultimately, the decisions for the typography were made after looking at several options with a sans for the name and an accompanying serif for the descriptive title.

Here is the new business card. If you see me around, ask me for one and it’s yours.

Site

I had quite a list of features I wanted in my new site. Many of them were strictly on the back-end that none of you will ever see but which allow me to easily add new content and client galleries, etc. For the end user my primary concern was to have large images that loaded quickly. I also wanted the entire site to be flash free.

For the navigation I wanted everything accessible from one click without any need to scroll to get to the nav. We accomplished this for everything except for the blog archives, categories, & links which are two clicks away. You’ll notice the “sidebar” of my blog is stuck to the bottom of your browser. I wanted to have this information available without having to scroll back to the top, and, I didn’t want a side column next to the images I post.

To get the largest images possible we created a site that scales to the user’s monitor size. That way we could be sure the images are being viewed as large as possible in any given scenario.

Here is the site on a large display.

And here is how it scales down for smaller laptops & iPad.

In the end everything scaled well for all screen sizes, even mobile devices. However, I liked the idea of a mobile site that would be a little easier for a mobile user to navigate. If you have a smart phone of some kind, navigate on over to jaarongreene.com and you’ll be redirected to the mobile site (if you’re not, let me know and try m.jaarongreene.com in the meantime).

Here’s the mobile site. It features the full content of the regular site, not being abbreviated like a lot of mobile sites are.

Portfolio

In the way of portfolio, I’ve made a lot of edits and added some new categories. I’m still not completely settled on these categories so it will be changed up from time to time. Thanks to the magic of Matt Hamann, I don’t have to write any code to create or change my portfolios. I just drop all my images into folders on the server and the rest is generated for me!

Thanks

I owe a lot of people thanks for their help and collaboration on this project. First, my developer Matt Hamann, who never said no to any of my requests. As I continued to throw new ideas at him throughout the project his response would always be, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure we can figure something out to make that work.” Often, he’d come back with a solution that was even more simple than I proposed when it came to having the site work for me. He also did this project on the side while completing the Master’s Degree program at Carnegie Mellon. Matt, mad props.

Second, my brother Caleb. I bounced my ideas off of Caleb throughout the project and he helped me make some of the tough decisions. Any designer knows it’s really hard to design something for yourself. Well, he helped me on those tough decisions that will slow your project to a stand still and he sometimes stepped in to create some of the elements when needed. Caleb, thanks for your input.

Third, thank you Bryan Martin for looking over the final spacing and details of my business card. You helped me get a lot of information on the back of that card in a nice way.

Finally, my wife Mollie, who has had to endure hearing about every pixel detail. I’m sorry, Love.

Feedback

Any and all feedback would really be appreciated. If nothing else, at least let me know you stopped by in the comments below. I realize my site has been very quiet for some time and I probably won’t get too many visitors, but one small comment on record would mean something to me.

Additionally, if you see something that doesn’t look right in your browser, please let me know what browser and platform you’re on so we can address any issues.

We still have a punch list of things to address but as anyone in the web world knows, this is the beginning of the project, not the completion.