Aarron Walter

I’ve just recently completed a new project, with which I am happy, for daniel*richards, a wholesale representative of stationary and gifts based in Atlanta and Chicago. I would call it a small brand site with big heart. The design is simple and centralized, using a color coded division design pattern, and collapsible panels that make flipping though the information snappy. There’s plenty of rich color that reflects their products and they way they display them in their showrooms. I used Bauhaus as the base typeface as its efficient, un-modulated strokes with strong geometric forms is both functional and elegant, just like the products daniel*richards.

There’s some fancy technology under the hood too. JavaScript makes the collapsible panels tick, and and Ajax loads the content into the panels, allowing the four key pages to be accessed in one area. When JavaScript is disabled, the site gracefully degrades by enabling the hyperlinks on the accordion bars, which navigate to the individual pages rather than loading them with Ajax. Although the site is valid XHTML Strict, the presence of a link tag inside of noscript causes a validation error that I was willing to accept since this one line of code made the graceful degradation, and consistent user experience with or without JavaScript possible. The mailing list sign up on the home page also uses Ajax to make joining fast and effortless.

I learned a valuable lesson working on this project. The original design was considerably darker, with green as the base color for the home and utility pages. A darker green background to the page made the design a little heavy. The client noted this and made some suggestions to rethink the design after I had built it out. I was hesitant since the site was already built, and my instincts tell me to protect my designs like they are my children. After considering the suggestions further, I realized that there was some real validity in the criticisms, and I proceeded to make some changes to find common ground. The result was a superior design that I may have missed had I let my ego get the best of me. I do believe there is a time to defend your design, but if you find yourself being defensive, then your ego is probably leading you down the wrong path, and that means you are no longer working with your client.

Check out the finished site, or learn more about it in my portfolio.