Development
Here you’ll find some of the work I’ve done recently. Most of my current work involves upkeep and feature updates for my clients, so there aren’t so many design heavy pages here. HOWEVER, I’ve got a few new custom WP themes in the works. Visual! Exciting! Ahhh!
M60 Design Group
M60 is a small company I created to manage all of my freelance work and side projects. I’ve worked with many companies over the years in several capacities. Here are some recent jobs and a couple of highlights:
FoodserviceIP
A research-based management consulting firm that specializes in foodservice.
Maintenance, security, general web consulting and problem solving for their WordPress / Divi based site.
Pentallect
A boutique food industry consulting firm specializing in business and strategic planning.
Site migration, security sweeps and some general consulting for their WordPress site. Recently helped setup their Events Calendar ticketing.
Haley’s Corkers
Creators of an incredibly useful and innovative wine corker.
Site migration and hosting. Maintenance, security and general web consulting. Help managing their WooCommerce sales system for their WordPress / Divi based site.
ATI Physical Therapy
A nationally-recognized rehabilitation provider, specializing in research-based physical therapy.
Consulted on the migration and information design of their on-prem SharePoint to an updated, redesigned Modern SharePoint implementation.
Dutch Farms
A family-owned company offering a full line of farm-fresh dairy products including quite good cheese.
Built their main WordPress site (designed by YNR Design), which they used for a little over a decade. Preformed ASP to PHP form conversions and provided occasional additions over the years.
ETC!
A bunch of different companies here and there. I’ve done a lot of little things over the years. I’ll have to check my email archives for details.
Dialogistic Industries
This is a company I created as a side project a few years ago. It never amounted to much. With all the new focus on A.I. tech recently, I decided it might be time to give the concept another go.
I’m in the process of rebuilding / rebranding / relaunching the entire endeavor. I’ll be adding new assets below as I create them; cards, letterhead, email templates, a full style guide etc. I’ve also added some test graphics I made but went unused.
This is an in-progress thing! Observe as it iterates!
Production Tests
Matching Assets
Negative Gain
Home of Negative Gain Productions record label. This site is built on WordPress using a custom Underscores theme.
This site had been around since 2011, so all of the content had been written using paragraphs with no specific classes for styling. A new theme had to be written with all that in mind. We also had a rather serious hack against the site that borked every other site on my server. That was a fun weekend getting that worked out.
I created a new theme using Underscores, which relies primarily on WordPress core updates, rather than needing theme specific updates. The theme itself was designed with the old content in mind, and used the existing paragraph and sidebar blocking to update its layout. It also got the full raft of security monitors, automatic updates and backups.
Wireframe
This is an in-progress thing as well.
This is the first of what will be many new block-based WordPress themes I’m building. This is one I’ve created to help build the next ones, as I can use it to sketch out ideas and layouts, move things around, then eventually export them more or less directly to full, downloadable themes. It will also be the test bed for custom block patterns and plugins I’ll be working on. Sweet!
Cool Hill
For this project the client needed a place where members of the park could pay their dues, check their payment status, and get information on the park rules and etc. It required around 100 unique user logins with each user page displaying personalized information to that user. These data were held largely in a Lotus 123 spreadsheet.
I started with WordPress and the base Sinatra theme and built it out from there. I used TablePress to handle the Lotus file, which I converted to Excel. I then made a couple of batch processes to create the user accounts, and managed those along with their various permissions with Members and a couple of other plugins. It all worked out rather well. Having said that, I’ll probably replace this with a more custom block-based theme eventually.
Unfortunate Destinies
This is a site promoting an AI based game which is languishing in development limbo. I think I’m going to re-write it all myself at some point.
This is meant to be a promotional tool for this game. Not to promote the game to potential buyers… we’re nowhere near that. This was hopefully going to promote the game to myself and a couple of friends to actually create the thing in the first place. Also, in testing the site for this portfolio, I discovered that the static doesn’t render at all in Vivaldi on Linux. Challenge!
Giraffe
This is little animated illustration I did for my friend’s birthday gift.
Aligning a few animations and having them all work together is sometimes a little tricky. There’s a better method to this than the one I used, I’m sure. Also, the textures were a bit of a pain, in that they’re not ideal for image optimization, which is good to have when this many elements are involved.
I mounted all the images into one large, scalable SVG. That took care of the element alignment. For the image optimization, I said “forget it” and put everything behind a loader. The textures in the image are worth it to me, and the loading time is relatively low.
MANGILAO!
Another turn-key site for a potential restaurant. I had some restaurant content around from when I did a job for Italian Dreams many years back… they stiffed me on that job btw, which broke my heart… I love their pizza. Mangilao!
This is a pretty standard BootStrap setup. I created an animation situation for the logotype, and built a little javascript thing that tells you the specials each day in the main navigation, which you can click and be taken to that item in the menu, so that’s neat. At some point I’m going to replace all the Lorem Ipsum with more realistic text, but for now, I don’t think anyone minds (and this site will likely be replaced soon). Also, I’ll replace the background images with higher resolution webp’s, or just use a CDN, which I’ll do for everything going forward.
…
Mangilao!
River Enterprises
A local site for my mom’s title search company, as well as a being a home for some other projects she’s working on. I built this site in the most simple way possible, with the design happening around a wave effect I wanted to do. It turned out well enough but, eh. This is not great and is being actively redesigned.
Susan’s Pet Care
This is a site I built for my friend Susan. She decided to go back to office work instead, but I like this site so it’s here for posterity if nothing else.
Oh, there were some hopping frog sprites I had running in the animated hero section. I never quite got the timing right on those. I’d forgotten about that until just now. Those are a challenge.
The frogs… well, I haven’t solved that problem yet. I’ll add those in soon, then I’ll talk about how I did them here.
The Bus Stop
Here’s another css animated illustration. I likely won’t be doing more of these for fun, as they’re a lot of work and you don’t get much out of them.
This is another effort in my wanting to create a single, scalable / responsive block. It has all the same pros and cons of the giraffe one I did.
This mostly works. It may have timing issues in Safari. I think I’ve got those worked out, but Safari has shifting sands sometimes with its interpretation of certain css rules.
Donut Thing
This is the second to last project I did using jQuery. I like how it turned out, so it’s here. It may not stay for long.
Not a lot of challenges, honestly. I had to write a bit of copy for it, which in re-reading it for inclusion here, I found I was not appalled by it. It’s always a challenge to write “interesting” content. I did make sure to say these facts were “relatively interesting” however, so that took some pressure off.
Once I settled on the format it was just a matter of writing the content, finding the images and putting it all together. I may do more of these. I have an idea for one about burgers. On second thought, no one’s paying me to do these, so I’ll keep my burger facts to myself, because I am a selfish monster.
The Drive
Here’s another css animated illustration. This is a work in progress. Right now it’s a simple animation of a 1955 Chrysler Imperial convertible driving along with wholesome abandon.