The new site had been given a temporary design for a while, so it was time to call in a designer and developer who knew what they were doing. Enter graphic designer Darcy from Graphically Designing and Gary from Gamajo Tech, a web development company from Basingstoke.
Darcy, based in Iowa in the US, was given free reign on the design, with the only conditions being that the logo was to stay as it was, and that the Twtvite invite was to stay in the sidebar.
Rather than go backwards and forwards trying to perfect a design in Photoshop, Darcy and Gary worked collaboratively on the live site evolving it as they went along. This approach to designing in the browser was new to Darcy, but provided instant feedback on the design in it’s native environment.
Working with Gary on this design was a lot of fun. Since they already had a logo and color palette in place, my job was to pull it all together. Since this site is based on Twitter, we wanted to echo Twitter’s rounded, bubbly style. Using a font face similar to Twitter, a bit of web 2.0, and the same radiant curves, we were able to tie in the inspiration for the site into the site itself.
I hope the design provides the perfect backdrop for the true shining star around here – the chance to get to meet local people.Darcy
There weren’t too many technical challenges on this project. The site and base theme were already in place, so my main task was to implement the design elements that Darcy provided.
The tweetroll was an added extra – instead of using the native WordPress widget for links, I decided to write my own function to achieve the same. This then allows changing the format of the links in one single place in the code, rather than having to edit each link individually.
Grabbing the Twitter avatar for each user was also interesting. I took the code implemented and described at Twivatar and created a copy on my own so that we weren’t relying on an site outside of our control.Gary
Though this was the first project Darcy and Gary had worked on together, future projects may be in the pipeline.
