www.brilliantshadows.com

My client was a typical professional photographer who was doing his best to get his work out there on his own dime. His images were showcased on an assortment of hosts including Flickr, .Mac and GoDaddy.com. He needed a site and brand that would be able to pull all of his work under one roof.

Primary goals of the design/build:

1. Create an new identity/logo for the client (Brilliant Shadow Photography).
2. Host images in three main galleries (Fashion, Band, and Wedding photography).
3. A seemlessly styled blog (incorporating the same look and feel as the rest of the site).
4. An information page where the three main services were explained.
5. An about page with bio and contact information.

Design concepts:

After looking at many of my client's images, I was able to see that his style of photography would be well suited to a neutral dark background (his photographs have a decidedly puchy feeling higher-contrast and saturated colors).

I combined this with my native style of ornamented simplicity to create the current site design. To "ornament" the simple dark gray background I mirrored the diagonal elements in the logo in subtle dividing lines at the top and bottom of the site, customized active-link indicators, and a leading forward-slash on the site subtitle.

Custom tweaks:

- changed the standard vertical navigation to horizontal to fit in with the style better (works well when you are building sites with only a handful of pages).

- changed the active link indicator to a forward slash to mirror the angles in the logo.

- reigned in the margins and padding on the image thimbnails so that they were under my control.

- @Home: used the custom css to move the gallery titles under the thumbnails (and display on hover).

- @Photo Blog: this is actually another multiple gallery page. Styled to allow just enough text while maintaining focus on the images throughout.

- I also did not like the default breadcrumbing within the galleries so I changed them. This is more of a hack, but it was the easiest way to get my desired result. I changed the non-link text to the same color as the background so that the end-user would be able to return to the previous gallery page, but not have to see a title for individual images.

- pulled the pageFooterWrapper out of the pageBodyWrapper so that it "stuck" below the content and sidebar

Brilliant Shadows Website was Designed and Developed by Josh Kill of Kill Design + Photography