DTS is one of New Zealand’s leading business broadband providers and I was really honored to be asked to design & develop a new web site for them.

The site was developed with the WordPress framework so that it’s easy to maintain and is built around the concept of progressive enhancement. This basically means that it looks it’s best in new, CSS3 capable browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc) and still degrades to work nicely in Internet Explorer but without some of the visual niceties.

Check out the new DTS website here.

I was looking through some photos on my phone recently and came across this hard-case photo of my boy. This is his “I’m stuck to the floor” pose but to me it looked more like kung-fu … and an opportunity to try a little more photoshop compositing.

There were a number of steps in putting this image together, and though I wont go through each of them I’ll mention some of the more interesting ones.

1. One of the first things that I had to do was cut Ash off the background of the original photo. This was just a camera phone shot and was pretty noisy and blurry. I used the quick selection tool to get a pretty close selection then tidied it up by manually painting in black or white where required.

2. Ash’s shadow was repainted. I selected a shadow color from the background image rather than just black as that helps to keep things a little more believable. For the shadow layer make sure the blend mode is set to multiply.

3. I applied some back lighting to Ash using the same technique as in the luminous butterflies image. I also dropped the intensity of the original highlights on him to try to better match the light in the background image.

4. Because Ash hadn’t had a haircut for a while I decided to go for a sort of “70′s look”. I adjusted the overall colour with curves and then applied some orange-ish gradients. I set the blend mode on these to ‘color’ to blend them in a bit more and get the effect I wanted.

5. Lastly I added lots of lens dust  and some vignettes to seal the deal.

You can see the final composite below. Click for a larger version.

Final photoshop composite

Like so many businesses, Creative Space had a web site that simply didn’t reflect the nature and quality of their work. Until now that is.

Creative Space are a Tauranga based architectural studio who had outgrown their previous web site. They needed a new look to aid in a marketing campaign and it needed to be very clean and very sharp .. just like their work.

I worked closely with Andre & Troy from Creative Space and produced a number of design variations based upon common themes of space, subtlety and crispness.

The site is designed to showcase their great work so we are using large images with large thumbnails throughout the site and, combined with professional photography, the end result is very visual and it becomes very easy to grasp the nature of their work.

There are subtleties too, such as the fade effects on the thumbnails and project loads (achieved with a combination of CSS & jQuery) as well as the custom typeface (handled via Cufon for maintainability) and a brief logo reveal on the homepage. These all combine to add a feeling of quality to the web site.

I’m very pleased with the end result and look forward to working with Creative Space in the future.

To visit the Creative Space website please click here.