Larren Art Trust
After the successful reception of my work on the Quaker site, I was asked to design the website for the Larren Art Trust. Although they had been running a small website for a number of years, they wanted to start from fresh and re-purpose the site.
The Larren Art Trust was set up to promote the work of a graphic designer, Ron Waddams. He has a bold, distinctive artistic style and many of his works deal with themes of peace and justice. One of the primary aims for the new website was to act as a catalogue and gallery for potential exhibitors, providing pre-views of the work and the information they would need for choosing works.
To this end, one of the largest areas of development was a gallery of his works. The Trustees also wanted a clean, attractive interface that would show off Ron's work to best advantage without overwhelming or clashing with the bold colours that he always uses. I also felt that it was important for the website design to tie in with their current marketing styles.
The Trust logo is one of Ron's works called 'Encore'. This is a black and white, circular image that is usually colourised in their literature to tie in with poster and leaflet designs. I used a lightened version of this image as the backdrop for each page to carry the theme. After careful consideration, I chose a red and grey colour scheme with plenty of white space. This creates a bold, distinctive colour scheme that doesn't clash with the bright colours on the works that are the core of the site.
Combining XHTML and CSS enables a flexible layout that downloads quickly even on the gallery pages and complies with the main criteria of the WAI guidelines for accessibility. Many of the gallery images needed extensive preparation in Paintshop Pro due the difficult lighting conditions that the photographer faced.
The end result is my proudest achievement so far and the response from the client has been terrific.