A while back, I asked Ollie about the bright colors on his site. I thought that they were a tad bright to have the work 'punk' in the domain name. Well, Ollie went from punk to artist somewhere between buying the domain name and now.
Since, my mind has been working overtime thinking about how to combine the 'artist' and the 'punk'. These are two styles that just clash in the design world... you toss in the word 'digital' and you have created a concept that is yet to be defined. Being a design-freak, I am always looking for a challenge... and I still have not found a solution to this design combination.
Tonight, I took my first real stab at it. I am not completely satisfied. I used a one-pixel sliver of a piece of Ollie's artwork for the background. This produced... in my opinion... a wicked background. LIking the background so much, I wanted to let as much of it show through as possible... so I tried a new trick (inspired from Iomega). You cannot adjust the opacity in HTML, which is crap. Every other thing on the planet has it. Anyway... so you have to trick HTML into doing it. It is simple, and you cannot figure it out in about 3 minutes, e-mail me. I used this 'trick' in the background of the text field as well as the primary image. This allows the background image to show through no matter what size the user has the window scaled to.
Whoa, that turned into blab, didn't it. Well, here is more.
I am still trying to add a bit more 'punk' to the mix. I think I have captured the artist and the digital. I am not sure exactly what to try next. I am think a bit more punk could be added with images for navigation. I am thinkng a kind of black spray-painted stencil look. You have any ideas or comments, e-mail 'em to me. I am still searching here.
Disclaimers: All artwork and etc belongs to Ollie. Nothing is wrong with Ollie's site, nor am I redesigning it for him. I am just looking for a good design challenge. Do not follow my example and redesign peoples sites without their... permission. Doh... next time.