When Cyrus Mejia asked me to rebuild his website in 2008, it had been 7 years since we built his first website in 2004. Time for an upgrade (for both of us). By this time I’d built a few sites on Drupal, and saw much potential for it as a dynamic platform, able to support a wide variety of client needs as well as my own creative solutions. Armed with this new powerful tool, and eager to work magic for my dear old dad, we dove in deep to come up with a unique take on the artist’s portfolio website.
Using everyone’s favorite web graphics editor, we came up with a relatively complex and somewhat “app like” design for the website. “Flat” was not the dominant aesthetic of the time and we were excited for a “Rich UI” feel, dripping with texture and depth. This was just before CSS3 opacity and shadows were a viable option for cross browser websites, so this “Rich” aesthetic was difficult at best to pull off. Our solution involved many PNG rollovers, textured backgrounds, and translucent overlays. And this is how I got to know about ‘sprites’.
This was also my first opportunity to create a custom Drupal module, of the ubiquitous “site module” variety. For the next few years I would offer my services as a developer of custom Drupal sites, tackling more complex and involved projects every few months.
Designed and developed a new Drupal 6 website with a custom module, theme, and graphics to meets the client’s requirements for an “artist’s portfolio” website.
Designed a full suite of custom graphics to support the “rich ui” requirements of this project.
Fit all required functionality into an app-like “fixed width” and “fixed height” layout.
Customized all user interface elements (even overriding core styles) in a scalable manner, to match the desired app-like look and feel.
Developed a “thumbnail slider” display to preview the content of each gallery from a gallery listing page.
Developed lightweight solutions to seamlessly integrate third party web services, including a PayPal based e-commerce solution and MailChimp based newsletter subscriptions.
Screenshot from the home page featuring a carousel of promoted images from the galleries.
