Holy Heart Theatre

Holy Heart Theatre has been a mainstay for local concerts, recitals and plays for 50 years.

The new site features lots of exciting new components. Up front, that slick scrolling action is provided by Mark Dalgleish’s Stellar.js, and the show listing is handled by the always useful jQuery Masonry from David DeSandro.

Being a theatre site, promoting shows and events was at the heart of the requirements. Modern Tribe’s The Events Calendar came through as the obvious way to help manage this. The Events Calendar works perfectly right out of the box — the user creates an event, it shows up in a ‘brick’ in the masonry layout, and also gets added to a calendar view. Easy peasy.

The site is fully responsive and is built with WordPress of course—as I publish this, it’s ticking along with WordPress 3.5-Beta2 which adds the exciting new media management workflow, and features my first use of the excellent Custom Field Suite.

December 2012

The Dardanelles

The Dardanelles have slowly been tweaking and redefining traditional music since forming in 2005. They’ve brought their energetic folk tunes, ballads and reels to audiences across Canada, the US and as far afield as Australia. I had the honour this past winter of designing and creating their internet livingroom.

The site was built with WordPress and features the awesome Portfolio Slideshow Pro from MadebyRaygun, and MP3-jPlayer serves up the Flash-free audio for all you iPad surfers out there. Same as usual, I started with Victoria Park, my fork of Automattic’s Toolbox theme. Many thanks to band member and fellow designer Matthew for gently poking and prodding to make sure we yielded the best possible result.

May 2012

Bartlett Studio

Jonathan Bartlett is an amazingly talented illustrator. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, The Atlantic and too many others to list.

I worked on the development and the WordPress-ification of Jonathan’s portfolio. Meg at Ghostly Ferns worked up a fantastic design.

April 2012

Snowball

Can’t read the light text on Daring Fireball‘s dark background? Me either. And now you don’t have to.

Snowball is a simple jQuery bookmarklet that tries to lighten the mood a little. It works best on Daring Fireball, but also works anywhere else on the web. Basically, it makes the text dark and the background light. Easy as that.

The list of selectors is incomplete, but I’ll be adding to them as I go. If you come across a site that Snowball doesn’t work on, just send me a note and I’ll add it in. When I make a change, you won’t need to do anything. The selector will be ready to use next time you need it.

January 2012

Matthew Byrne

Matthew Byrne is a fantastic local musician. We worked together over the past few weeks to create a site that we hoped add a modern twist to traditional music websites.

The site was made with WordPress, and features the HTML5 theme, Toolbox from Automattic,  Backstretch, a jQuery plugin from Scott Robbin, and photos from me.

Matthew’s site was featured on Design Fridge and The Best Designs the day after it launched.

If you’re unfamiliar with Matthew’s work, be sure to check out The Banks of Newfoundland—my personal favourite—on the music page.

June 2011

Captain Bookmarks

Captain Bookmarks started the day it was announced that Yahoo was closing Delicious. Instead of relying on fleeting 3rd parties to manage our bookmarks, I thought there was a better way: just use WordPress, a tool you already know how to use.

Through the Captain Bookmarks site, I’ll be releasing new themes to hold all your bookmarks! As a start, check out Treasure Island.

June 2011

Field Notes from Italy

Every wedding needs a honeymoon. Field Notes from two weeks in Italy documents the search for the perfect espresso around Venice, Florence and Rome.

*Slated for release before August 6 (the 1st anniversary)!

June 2011