douglaskoke.com

Took this site live last week. Turned out really nice, I think. Many thanks to Tom Benway for setting up the CMS backend.

Made some progress on the interior pages of the children's Flash site I've been working on...

I've taken on some contract work lately, to keep my web-design chops up, and it's been a ton of fun. Definitely enjoying this project in particular-- an all-Flash site for a children's church group. Can't wait to animate this one!

Above is my original pitch. The client wasn't in love with the Noah's Ark theme, so we decided to try something with an amusement park motif instead.

Above is my second pass at the design, implementing the amusement park theme for the "Kidz Jam", and some different photographic elements for the other two age-groups.

Above, and below, is the third (and hopefully final) pass at the homepage, with some new illustrations for the "Baby Jam" and "Jungle Jam" sections. The church's in-house graphics department did the animals, and I drew the babies.

I think the project's going to call for quite a bit of animating and compositing in After Effects, which I'm really looking forward to. My friend Tom Benway is partnering with me on this one as well, building an awesome content-management system to plug dynamic content into the Flash. Nice! 

Here's some design elements I'm working on for a promotions company that provides information, music and live video feeds from various night clubs in Las Vegas. Should be a fun project.

Here's the homepage layout I came up with from my initial themes for Energy 92.7 in San Francisco.

This week at the jobby-job, I'm desiging a new site for a dance/electronic station in San Francisco. They have a pretty massive listenership, and a lot of web-traffic, so I'm trying to take some extra time to play with the graphics and really focus on the details with this one. Here's a couple themes I'm liking, so far...

Here's a test layout of a website I'm designing at work for a radio station in Boston. The client is super artsy and enthusiastic, so they're letting me get pretty wacky with this one. I'm really hoping they like it!

We're putting together a new website for Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles at work-- a fairly huge project that we're all really excited about. It's probably one of the five best radio stations in America-- at least Rolling Stone Magazine thinks so -- with a playlist that covers everything from The Clash, to Hank Williams, to Clliff Richard, to Interpol and everything in-between, with an emphasis on punk and indie rock. Their DJ's include  Dave Navarro, Henry Rollins, and my personal favorite, Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, who hosts what is possibly the most surreal radio show known to man.

The station's branding was all designed by Shepard Fariey of Obey-Giant fame, so my inner art-nerd has been completely thrilled with the opportunity to mess around with graphics put together by one of my design heroes. (I have a couple of his prints hanging in my office at home, so even though I'm waaaaaay down the pipeline, it's still a pretty cool deal for a design geek like me.) 

The flash pieces, in particular, have been a lot of fun-- I've been trying to make everything look like grainy, badly-spliced clips of Super 8 film. Good times. I can't wait for this one to go live.

I was was feeling pretty marooned and landlocked this weekend, so I decided to put these together, to remind myself of some beautiful memories of Maui, and whine a little that I had to come home. My concept was-- don't slap me -- to juxtapose beauty with immobility and powerlessness. Basically, trying to get somewhere perfect, and then stranding yourself in the process. Y'know-- pretentious, artsy shit like that. :)  Snobbery aside, I think I'm probably gonna use these as the basis for a portfolio / playground thingy.

We're trying to put together a series of template websites at work, based on musical genres. The idea is to offer a fast, affordable web solution for stations who don't have a large budget for interactive marketing. The top two graphics are from an Alternative Rock template I designed, and the bottom two are for Hip Hop stations.

The barrage of radio station websites continues at work. Shown here are a few of the better ones-- a classic rock station called "The Eagle", a country station in Kansas, and a sports station in Texas. Yee-Haw.

After doing some poking around on the InterWeb, I discovered that an alarming number of websites were using a "floating island" motif, so I decided to switch things up a bit with my new portfolio. Shown above are some elements I plan on using in the site's background. I have a TON left to do, but so far, I'm liking where it's headed...

Here's what I'm thinkin' for my new portfolio at Site07.

I don't want to jinx myself, but if  I can pull off what I see in my head, this site will be pretty crazy. Now I just gotta' figure out how to do it.

I had a lot of fun putting together this piece for another radio station in Nebraska-- it gave me a chance to practice some fire effects in Photoshop, which is something I haven't really done before. I'm not a big fan of the station's logo-- as a design snob, I'm usually not -- but all in all, I think this turned out very nice.

I got a bug up my ass and decided to overhaul my design portfolio (Site07.com), beginning with a temporary splash page.  I went through a couple different ideas before landing at the one that felt right, shown in the entry above this one.  I hope to post an entirely new portoflio with all my recent goodies sometime in the next couple months. I'll also try and get something up for my musical project, White Courtesy Telephone, as well-- at least a homepage and an MP3 player, with some new tunes. It's LONG overdue. Lots of work to do!

Yet more Flash headers for radio sites:

Above is an artist collage I built for a station in Minnesota.

This second piece is a header I made for a top-40 station in Lincoln, NB.

We re-designed our site at work again for 2007. Here's some of the graphics I worked on.