Elisco Design Architects
Role: Designer & Lead Developer
Published: Aug 2015
This was one of the first sites I built and designed, way back 10 years ago. It's still one of my favorites. Elisco was an opportunity to do something new and different; primarily using bolder elements/colors, and creating more varied layouts.
The design took its inspiration from Elisco's logo; the overlapping blocks with strong colors, and a playful set of dots trailing down. It was the trail of red squares, extending the full height of the site, that I feel adds visual interest, to an otherwise clean layout. The main focus of the site is on its photography, allowing the client's work to speak for itself.
It was the portfolio section that was the biggest challenge. The client already had galleries and albums full of photography in a (now-dead) photo management tool called SlideShow Pro (SSP). SSP did provide its own slideshows, but they were Flash-based. Even at the time, it was clear that a native HTML/JavaScript slideshow was going to be the best option. I built a custom PHP interface with SSP's back-end, to retrieve the images and their metadata, and created a varied-width slider to rotate through the photos in a given album. This interface also handled "galleries" (collections of related albums), to handle the related albums that display below the primary slideshow.
Knowing what I know now, I would have focused more on performance and accessibility for this site, but the design remains strong to this day.