Inspired by a 1970’s Wedding invitation, my father requested I produce a newspaper style invitation for his approaching 60th birthday celebrations. Using the original wedding invitation, I produced a fictional newspaper’s front page with sensational stories of how my father was denying his inevitable aging process falsifying documents and destroying evidence to the contrary.

My Role

Design, photography and printing.

Development Method

Using typical newspaper heading and body text fonts, along with a typical newspaper grid layout, I made up a number of stories that I though reflected the average front page of a modern newspaper. I organised to have the invitation printed on 250gsm card paper so that it would keep its shape in the post.

HRH approached Dongshiworx, (a company I do work for) with the intention of promoting his business and personal life on the Internet.

My Role

Design and development of the entire Web Site.

Project Special Features

• Custom-themed open source photo management system modified to use Javascript slideshow application.
• Custom Wordpress theme seamlessly integrated into site.
• Clean, semantic XHTML degrades gracefully and is highly accessible.
• Multiple style sheets make for easy modification of layout.
• Clean code and thoughtful choice of META tags has already yeilded good search engine rankings.

Greg Yen was commissioned to photograph Micheal W Smith’s Pretoria Concert and asked me to assist to get extra coverage of the event. It was a packed show and excellent concert, and although it was an evening of work, I enjoyed having the best ’seats’ in the house!

My Role

Photography and photographic editing work

Development Method

As the photographers had access to a position only a few meters away from the performers, I decided to use my sharp, fairly fast 50mm f/2.8 macro lens which proved to be perfect for the occasion. I got some great shots of Michael W Smith, who is a very entertaining performer and excellent musician.

This is the second ‘Dinner Club’ invitation I designed for a friend. Please read about the first dinner club invitation as well.

My Role

Design of the invitation

Development Method

The second venue for ‘Dinner Club’ was a 1950’s-style restaurant with attached theatre. I wanted to combine a classic theatre feel with an upmarket restaurant. The spotlight behind the card, ‘glamour girl’ image and speech bubble combine to give the Invitation a classic, yet fun, theatre feel.

A friend, organising a series of social get-togethers called ‘dinner club’ asked me to design a unique invitation. In the process I learned a few useful Photoshop tricks.

My Role

Design of the invitation

Development Method

Having browsed a lot of creative work in the previous few weeks, I knew that I wanted a faded, old look for the invitation. I also knew that the design needed an element specific to a formal dinner. I chose a fork and business card to signify a meal and invitation simultaneously. The red seal was specifically requested by the client. My friend, and the recipients of the invitation were all really pleased with the end result.

Project Special Features

• Convincing ‘old map’ style
• Original photography

SA Eagle was one of South Africa’s largest insurance companies. For years, the Zurich Insurance group has owned a progressively larger share of the company, and In July this year, SA Eagle officially changed its name to Zurich. Graphic Designer and Photographer Greg Yen was commissioned to photograph the event and asked me to assist, as the event was too large for one person to cover. The ceremony was repeated twice.

My Role

Photography and photographic editing work.

As previously mentioned, I occasionally partner with Greg Yen on more technical projects. The Bond Exchange of South Africa (BESA) were celebrating Oktoberfest, and had commissioned Greg to create a design for an email to be sent to all their clients. Greg contacted me to help with the coding of this email.

My Role

Coding of the design developed by Greg Yen.

Development Method

Using a tables based layout approach (the only viable way to construct HTML emails) I created simple code from the design Greg gave me. I also created a standards compliant XHTML and CSS online version of the email for users who may not have been able to view the original version.

A few months ago, a long time friend and I both decided to register a company under which to provide creative services. The name dongshiworx was chosen as the name of the company. ‘dong shi’ literally translated from Mandarin Chinese means ‘east west’, but is used in common speech as a word for ’stuff’. As we were providing a range of services at the time, we felt this was an appropriate name! I agreed to design and construct a web site for this company that would differentiate it from other South African web firms. I decided that a focus on table-less, accessible design would be a good differentiating factor.

My Role

Design and development of the entire site. Modifications to the initial content, and additional sections were added by my partner.

Development Method

Attempting to construct a simple, clean looking site, I played around with various designs, keeping CSS styling abilities in mind. I wanted a site that would be compact and could fit a monitor of any resolution from 800 to 1600 pixels wide. A large background image with a fixed width, centred content section was chosen. Once Craig and I were happy with the design, I converted the Photoshop designs into static XHTML and CSS based Web pages. I enjoyed creating the images on the left of each section. The final step was to write PHP code for the contact form.

Project Special Features

• Navigation menu has a unique behaviour
• Static XHTML and CSS files are compact, fast loading and easy to read and maintain
• Cross browser compatible
• PHP-based contact form.

Greg Yen is a South African graphic designer and photographer whom I occasionally partner with on projects. One of his Clients, the Civil Aviation Authority, was conducting an annual event that required an email campaign. Greg asked me to do the front and back end coding for his design.

My Role

Front and back end coding. Design by Greg Yen

Development Method

I started out transforming the photoshop file into a standards-based XHTML and CSS web site with embedded style sheet (as few email clients support external style sheets). Testing in various email clients quickly revealed that this approach was not working. Research later revealed that Microsoft’s newest version of Outlook has lost a lot of the CSS support of previous versions, so the code was scrapped, the design modified slightly and the new design was transferred into an ‘old style’ tables-based layout. For accessibility purposes, an online version was still provided via a link in the email.
Once the static page was displaying correctly in various email clients, the PHP coding for the form was done and tested extensively before being sent to Greg’s client.

This site, for a game farm in Mpumalanga province, South Africa was constructed in XHTML, CSS and PHP, and uses Wordpress to manage the page content. Osebeni needed a site that could be easily and quickly updated. The site contains a lot of interactivity, including RSS weather feeds, Quicktime panoramas and CSS image maps, among others. This has been my biggest project so far.

My Role

Photography, Design, Coding and Maintenance

Development Method

My first task was to visit the Reserve to meet with the managers and photograph the area. I photographed a number of key spots on the property and elicited enough information from the managers to begin working on the project. After a few iterations, a design was settled on, and I began to turn the design into an XHTML and CSS based web site. Once this web site was displaying correctly in standards-compliant browsers, I made changes to accommodate users of older browsers as well. I encountered problems with the CSS-based image maps and roll-overs used in the ‘lodge’ section of the site. All browsers displayed this page correctly except Internet Explorer 7. Fortunately, the friendly CSS-discuss mailing list came to my rescue and a fellow developer managed to ’squash’ this little bug. Back on track once again, I converted the cross browser compliant static pages into a Wordpress theme template, which I applied to the installed Wordpress system. Prior to doing this, however, I needed to make the necessary arrangements to change the ‘osebeni.co.za’ domain to point to a new server under my control. Once installed, I filled the template with all the prior agreed material. I also wrote instructions for the managers on how to use the Wordpress CMS system and publicly viewable booking schedule.

Project Special Features

• Attractive, wide header bar, enabling the site to accommodate screen resolutions from 800 to 1600 pixels across.
• RSS weather feed, assisting visitors plan their trip.
• Cross browser compatible CSS - based image roll-overs and image maps which degrade gracefully.
• Google calendar integration, providing guests with a real-time booking schedule
• Various PHP-based forms to simplify booking and communication.
• Interactive Quicktime panoramas of views from the reserve
• CSS based tabbed navigation
• Flexible layout, accommodating users’ choice of text size