Introducing the New and Improved Bay Nature
I’ve been a little quiet on the blog front lately. I’ve been a bit obsessed – obsessed with designing a new logo, website, and complete new brand identity for Sheriar Designs. Finally! It’ll probably take me quite a while to get the site redone, so I’ll give a bit of a sneak peak in the near future, but right now I’m here to talk about another project that’s been taking up my time …
Recently I had the privilege of completing the design and front-end work on the new Bay Nature site. The project was a real pleasure from start to finish as I had a great site to work on, great imagery to work with, and a great team – mainly Dan Rademacher of Bay Nature and David Siedband of Wolf and Associates, who did the backend work in Plone.
Without further ado:
To get a sense of what the old site looked like …
Quite an improvement, if I do say so myself. ;~)
July 10th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Well done Mani! It’s a beautiful design.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:37 am
WOW. Yes…you made quite the improvement. Nice job. I especially like the attention to detail with the gradient banner place holders complete with dimensions. I don’t think I would’ve ever though of that.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
There goes another Plone design. Yay. Really fantastic economy of space and such a deliciously warm, earthy palette. Did you work with Plone theming? How was the experience compared to WP/Drupal?
July 20th, 2008 at 12:04 am
Hi Ross. Mani delivered the design as XHTML/CSS and I did the Plone skin post-production.
I find Plone skinning to me much more efficient and enjoyable than PHP theme integrations for the following reasons.
1) Plone’s templating language (TAL) uses a valid XML syntax which allows it to work with the many excellent XML editing/debugging tools out there.
2)The logic is very cleanly partitioned from the presentation which nicely separates the debugging worflows on those two elements.
A crucial thing to be aware of when developing designs for subsequent Plone integration is that Plone has a wealth of existing CSS for editing and management UI inside the O-Ring. For this reason, practices like global resets and styling at the tag level can cause a lot of pain. If you let your designer know about this and ask them to scope-constrain their css selectors, you’ll find that integrating their design goes quite smoothly.
Mani’s design was a joy to integrate. Working with her is really flying first class :)
July 20th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Awwwww … Thanks, David!!
July 25th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Beautiful work, Mani! Colour choices were impeccable.
– Jeni (aka: Chi)
March 28th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Amazing redesign! I have enjoyed looking through your portfolio and blog. I have a folder in my bookmarks where I draw design inspiration. It is titled “Heroes”, and you are now in it.