We recently completed a project for a top photography studio in Sheffield, and the brief was simple – a clean elegant design that would allow the brilliance of the photographs shine through. We’re pretty damn pleased with what we came up with; so was the client, but as we were progressing the design we came up against a problem with the two basic cropping modes in WordPress – neither was quite right for the job.
We needed to crop and resize images to fit within a 960 x 600 pixel space and ideally we wanted images to take up the full available space whenever possible because it looked best. Narrow bands of unused space top and bottom, or at the sides just wasn’t going to cut it. But on the flip-side we didn’t want to crop images too much, thus undoing all of the photographer’s good work – for example, portrait cropped photos should remain so.
What we needed was an intelligent cropping mode that would perform a little bit of cropping when necessary, but not too much as to wreck the images. To achieve this we had our clever developers edit our custom WordPress install – and now we’ve bundled those changes up into a tiny patch file that we intend to officially submit to the great folks at WordPress.
Then who knows, maybe one day it will find it’s way into the standard install. But for now we’re making it available to you fine people to get some feedback and see if it’s the kind of thing that you would find useful.
Sportily is an on-line app designed from the ground up to help league organisers do their stuff, as quickly as possible, with the minimum of fuss – only with a little bit of style at the same time! It’s been a long time in the making, but as we begin gearing up for a public release of Sportily (@sportily_app) we thought it’d be cool to begin posting some sneak peeks.
So here is sneak peek #1, giving a glimpse of a slick (well, we think so) interface for putting in game results and stats in real-time, as the game is being played. More coming soon…
Wow! We’re really excited about this one – working with Glyn and Nic at Shakespeare Photography has been fantastic. They asked us to come up with a new website that captures the elegance, simplicity, and understated quality of the photographs they capture, which was quite a daunting task for us – just take one look at their site and you’ll see that their work is absolutely stunning.
From the very beginning we wanted to create a design that would enable the images to take centre stage, giving them the lime-light that they deserved, without being drowned out by unnecessary design elements. At the same time we were keen to push a few boundaries where possible – check out the navigation bar on the homepage which follows you as you scroll down the page.
After a few unexpected delays we’re proud to announce that today sees the launch of a redesign of the Primecard website. Wanting to position themselves above their competitors in terms of quality and service, Primecard approached us to create a new look that was clean, simple and slick. Let us know if you think we delivered…
When it comes to building our sites, we like every little detail to be spot on, even the error pages. As WordPress doesn’t allow you to create a template for the error pages, we are going to show you how to create a plug-in to do just that, you can download it here: wordpress custom error plugin.
On your wordpress site you have a blog, right? What happens is someone doesn’t fill in the form correctly?
That isn’t as nice as it could be, wouldn’t you prefer the error page to match your website design?
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We wanted to create something we could give away as an early Christmas treat – something that is fun and possibly useful at the same time. What we have up with is (probably not all that useful, but we certainly had fun making it) a complete 2011 calendar, very minimalist in style, with tonnes of colour, in the shape of the numbers “2011″
The idea for this first struck us a while back after stumbling across Louie Mantia’s fantastic redesign of a popular board game on dribbble. So, here it is, in a variety of different sizes.
1920 × 1080 | 1600 × 1200 | 1440 × 900 | 1280 × 720
If you’d like a copy in vector format then leave us a comment and if there’s enough demand we’ll make it available right here.
Have a very Merry Christmas, from all of us here…
We’ve all heard it before: “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. Yet no matter how many times it’s repeated we all know that it’s difficult to avoid – it’s something that happens subconsciously whether we like it or not. To piggy back on an overused metaphor, think of your business as a book. How you advertise your business (including your website) is the book’s cover. If you already have a website, take a long hard look at it right now and think to yourself: “What impression does this give to my customers?”
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With a tagline like “design without disaster” we were probably setting ourselves up for a fall at some point; but we never expected that fall to come whilst designing our own business cards. Our experience and expertise lies very much in website design and web development, but (as anyone in this business will testify) being able to offer clients a complete branding package that includes printed media is vital. What better way to garner some much needed experience than to design our own business cards? As you can see, we ended up with fantastic looking cards, but not without a couple of hiccups along the way.
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Welcome to the Mudslide Design blog, where we’ll be documenting everything that makes us tick: from new services and announcements to client case-studies and more; with a few treats and goodies thrown for good measure. At times it’ll be technical, at times it’ll be exciting, and at times – if we’ve had a particularly bad day – it might even become an outlet for what ticks us off. But always we hope it’ll be entertaining and refreshingly honest, because if you’re going to be working with us you deserve to know who we are. So stay tuned.