Portfolio
I met Bonnie McCann of Photography by Bonnie a long time ago through the Digital Painting Forum. She lives in paradise in Kaneohe, HI which is literally a hop, skip and a jump from Honolulu. Given her location, Bonnie does a lot of tropical themed art and her photography ranges through nautical, aquatic, tropical and cultural themes. Stunning work – in fact, so stunning that she recently won the Grand Prize in the Artful Home’s 2008 Portfolio Competition!
In conjunction with her accomplishments, Bonnie decided it was time to toss out the old Flash template website she had been using in favor of a more classy and elegant interface that she could update quickly and easily and also included a blog and shopping cart system to sell her products online. In her list of requests for the new look was the light cyan that makes an appearance as the main content background color, a slight tropical feel (but remaining elegant) and to keep things as open as possible.
As all of you know by now, Marilyn and I work exceptionally well together, and as a result, we work together often. When Marilyn was ready to update her branding with a wonderful logo created by Charmaine Check at Check Studio, she came to me. The goal was for something refreshing, new and “Marilyn.” My first instinct was pink all over the place because Marilyn loves pink. It is a color that’s in all of her paintings, in every piece of marketing material I’ve seen from her, and of course the color she chooses to use as her daily skin color over at the Digital Painting Forum.
The first concept for her site is the same as above, but only in a rich set of pink and burgundy. She loved it, but always having had pink as a central color, decided it was time for a little change, something fresh. We played around with color palettes from a paint catalog (color inspiration is everywhere) and chose to keep pink as a strong accent, but opted for the blue and teal for the base design’s background. To make it more “Marilyn,” we used one of her most popular paintings [Bourbon Balcony] for a splash of color in the header.
The result is a contemporary, layered design that meets all of the goals we set out to accomplish. Now if only she could slow down enough so we can sit down and finish filling in all the content! Not to worry though, we have it on our to-do lists [along with plans for more expansion]. An artist’s work is never done!
Suzanne is a portrait artist from the Atlanta, GA area who uses modern digital tools to create one-of-a-kind portraits for clients. I met Suzanne for the first time a few years ago at DigitalPaintingForum.com and over that bit of time, we’ve built an online friendship as well
As a little bit of history for Suzanne’s site, a little over a year ago, Suzanne was one of Studio|chris’ first clients. For the first iteration of her site, we worked together to create a static HTML site that effectively represented her brand; however, since it was all HTML updates were a little complicated.
Her host at that time offered a blog engine, so she did maintain a blog as well, but due to limitations set by the host, the look could not match her site. This wasn’t good from a branding standpoint because as her site visitors navigated around, if they clicked on her blog, they went from the richly colored, jewel-toned site to her blog which was tan and white. The blog, though on the same domain name, was like an entirely different planet from her main site. This can be confusing to users as they wonder if they’ve left the site they were viewing or not.
As a solution to those two problems, the new SuzanneClemWheeler.com now uses a customized WordPress-based system to manage her entire site, which makes her content simple to update and brings her blog into her site with a consistent look and feel. She decided to maintain the same look as her old site with a few minor changes, and it still works beautifully. With her new site in place, Suzanne is ready to take the world by storm with her portraits.