We started her project by looking at lots of imagery, which I posted on the online interactive whiteboard  service Stixy.com. She told me she liked blues and greens, and gave me exmples of a few other sites she liked that had both a retro/cute factor and a certain sex appeal. This gave me enough direction to get started and what emerged was the desire for a nostaligic feel with a modern twist.

The above image caught her eye for a number of reasons, mainly because of color, but also for the imaginary fuzzy memories it seems to evoke. The ones that followed were from photos of found graffiti along with pinups and airplane bomber girls.

She definitely wanted to have a woman as part of her logo, so my job was to find a perfect pose and create the logo from it. From this point on it became a game of cutting and pasting pinup girls, turning them into digital “paper” dolls, with me manipulating their limbs this way and that until I got the perfect pose.

From here, however, I would need to get a model to put in this pose as plagarism is not my strong suit. I didn’t want to rip off anyone else’s work, so I set to finding a model.

Since I don’t have a lot of female friends who are pin-up models, the simplest thing to do was get on Flickr and contact a girl that might be interested in posing.

Turns out the perfect girl lived in Sweden, but she will willing to do the job remotely for a fair price, so I hired her to do the pose. Incredibly, she took her own photos and posed from her living room, and was able to make the necessary changes to get the perfect angles.

Once I had the reference photo, I set to work on adjusting contrast and some slight figure adjustments, and had my girl.

I put her in illustrator and once I got her looking the way I wanted, added some type. I used a font called “B-Movie” as the basis for the logotype, and made changes to the letterforms here and there to give them a more rounded feel. I left them alone for the “Served Hot” bit.

Now a theme was emerging and I discussed the idea of creating an identity that harkened back to old diner menus, which was well-received. This would also translate well for a webpage. I wanted to create a sense of playfulness on the page, and came up with some restaurant terms for the navigation, such as “Daily Specials,” “Our Entrées” and “Hot Plates.” Spinning off of this was a “Motto,” which was sometimes put on family diner menus, and “Hot off the Grill,” for press releases.

I built the site on the ExpressionEngine CMS platform, which to non-web people means that she can edit the website herself with the help of a fairly sophisticated framework that allows for password protected photo galleries, automatic press-release formatting, and fancy magazine flipbooks. Visit High Profile Media online.

Since they didn’t have any complete projects yet, I suggested we use illustration to get the message across, and later they could update new pictures of their work. They wanted a Flash animation for conveying their most important concepts, and a framework they could keep updated themselves without much training, so I suggested WordPress.

I designed the color palette of the site to go with updated colors on the logo, but after the site was built they decided to revert back to the original colors.

The website also needed to provide people with all of the information they needed before, during and after their journey. Each page includes a Flash-driven slideshow (in the image area) that cycles through slowly and continuously. We worked together on organizing the content and I encouraged her to link the content from page to page as much as possible to keep people looking around on the site. The client also wanted music on the site, which she provided. Visit Custom Tours in Tuscany.

I also thought it would be nice to commission a watercolor artist to paint a portrait of the building which could be used on postcards left in the rooms. Hotel owner Michele Nasatir agreed, and they have been reprinted several times over. This website is currently maintained by the client, and text has been added in several areas that differeed from the original. Visit the Embassy Hotel Apartments website.