I’ve just recently finished a project for an artist client, Caroline Newton , who wanted a website to sell her prints and greeting cards, as well as advertise up and coming exhibitions. The brief was fairly straight forward, to produce a clean, simple website that Caroline could update and add to. Easy to manage content and a simple flow through the site for her visitors were the main requirements.

The website was built using CSS and PHP with MySQL handling all the content. I use Dreamweaver to produce a template to keep all the layout consistant, and take advantage of Dreamweaver’s Server Behaviours to make light work of inserting php functions. I also built a simple CMS so Caroline to edit the content add new products to sell, again taking advantage of Dreamweaver’s Server Behaviours to insert, update and delete rows from a MySQL database.

For the first time in a while I decided to print up some labels and cover notes for the latest DJ mix I’ve put together [Summer 2009 by Martin Lucas]. Being a summery house mix I wanted the cover artwork to continue the vibe.

I started off with a sunset photograph from stock.xchng, and proceeded to add layers in Photoshop for the illustrative parts. I also used a flat black coloured layer over the original photograph and set this to a 25% overlay in the layer opacity options – this boosts the contrast and saturation, burning out whites, strengthening colours and darkening blacks. I used non-descriptive curls and swirls to fill in empty areas of the photograph, a banner – again from stock.xchng to use as a place holder for the descriptive text and finally a handful of butterflies and stars in the foreground to bring additional focus to the summer. The image wraps around half of the back of the sleeve, then fades into black to give a background for the tracklist and my contact details.