Sweet success!

In between bad news from client #1 and client #2, There is a bit of bright news. Not all is bad for ekynoxe!

Through international DJ Shur-I-Kan, whith whom I work at Orange, I came to meet Steve Maud of Cloud Nine Media, who was at the time looking to create a new website to showcase his videos, while providing him with the ability to do it all himself from a CMS.

Cloud Nine Media

I’ve been working a while with wordpress now, so it was not a question of how, but more about what would be the required features.

I’d put Steve in the ‘Artists’ and ‘Thinkers’ category of my clients. He has strong views on how the design should look, but yet takes on board much of the comments and suggestions I bring him along the design and development process. It’s at times a bit heavy with all the back and forth and little tweaks and changes to apply to the design, but I have very much enjoyed the different experience. Compared to total lack of feedback from other clients, I can safely say this is by far the best experience I’ve had!

I specially love the ideas and the freshness of thinking that Steve has when it comes to graphical and technical decisions. For example, the blue and orange colors come from a model of superdry shoes! And he told me straight away that he didn’t care about older browsers and wanted to go down the HTML5 route from day 1.

What more can a designer/developer want? =)

Ok, there have been a few tweaks to this approach, but overall the results is pleasing and very functional. For example, we had to adjust the colors of titles and text around the site to be bright enough, but not loose the links in the text; and rather than go through the pain of encoding ever single video in all the formats required for a pure HTML5 implementatin, we decided to use the excellent vimeo services.

There is more work to come to update the design and clean up a few things, but overall, Steve seems to be very pleased with the site and hopefully it will allow him to grow his business and show off his videos well.

Steve, remember to make that home page video? =)