From the start I knew I wanted something very simple to allow the focus to be on the photos. I jumped into my sketchbook & after about 20-30 minutes I knew the direction I wanted to go in.

Fireworks was my next port of call, I laid out a twelve column grid & brought my sketchbook concepts to the screen. As I went I leaked a few previews to my Dribbble account, which was awesome getting constructive feedback.

Building the site was the easy part, I’ve used HTML5 & some trick CSS3 bits, like box-shadow, opacity, transition & nth-child, this made for some pretty rapid development as well as some beautifully light & semantic markup.

For the image slider on the gallery pages I used the jQuery powered the Nivo Slider which I fell in love with a few months ago & have been dying for a reason to use. With the help of Jamie Thompson, & his ninja JavaScript skills, I customised the slider a little bit to automatically attach the thumbnails for each image to the page, oh I did some ninja CSS to give the images a bit of pre loading before they start running on the slider too, it makes the view experience so much better.

If you’ve got this far through this blog post you are probably expecting a link to the site right now… well I don’t like to disappoint so here – Go & check out my new photo site!

As always I would love some feed back on the site, good bad, black, white, anything goes.

If you are a web geek you might want to have a look at my style sheet, it’s OCD gone mad…

Anyway, enough of that, it’s been a really nice project to work on, James & I both had some really strong ideas. Three words came up over and over – Simple, Strong, Clean and I think this has translated nicely into the final product.

The Brand

First thing I thought about was the logo, I got some ideas down on paper and then translated them to screen. I actually ended up sending a whole bunch over to James, loads more than I would normally send.

In the end we settled on one of the simplest concepts, you might groan – Oh it’s Helvetica… but I don’t care, it works and it looks good.

The Site

I actually came up with quite a lot of the idea for the site while sitting next to Ashley at the FOWD Tour Glasgow, in the form of random sketches in the back of my Moleskine. Then they went into my layout pad at home, and I showed them to James, he got really excited about the concepts and could see exactly where I was going which was great.

After the sketches I did a proof of concept or two and once I was happy with how it was working I started translating that to WordPress. Man I love me some WordPress!

The Home Page

Roll on a few months and the build is complete, the home page features a giant background image for some wow factor (always guaranteed with a James Arnold photo).

The About & Contact Page

The about and contact page carry on the full size image, with a nice layer of content over the top.

The Galleries

The galleries are defiantly my favourite part of the site, so simple, it’s just throwing the images right up in your face. The images automatically scale to the height of your browser window, when you are on a gallery you can use your arrow keys on the keyboard to easily flick between photos, nice. I’ve done something pretty hot with the menu too, (thanks to Jamie for help with the JavaScript here).

The Blog

The blog is a bit of a contrast to the other parts of the site, more structure, more white space. Hopefully James will keep this updated, I’m hoping for some behind the scenes stuff!

Anyway, check it out – James-Arnold.co.uk – and let me know what you think!