MoveSeniors.com redesign

I want to take a moment to announce the relaunch of moveseniors.com. The previous iteration of this website was confusing to navigate, visually unappealing, and lacked a sound information architecture. Important content was difficult to find and a wealth of text was rendered as images—hidden from search engine spiders. Our goal with this redesign was to improve SEO, ease of navigation, accessibility and overall friendliness

The site needed to provide resources for aging adults transitioning into smaller homes while also serving as a training portal for aspiring senior relocation professionals. My roles in this project included information architecture planning, front end design, (X)HTML/CSS construction, Javascript implementation and content management. Click here to launch the site.

Moved by type

Beautiful typography, thumping backbeats, retro aesthetic. Does it get any better? This "typographic orgy" from Sebastian Lange rocked my world when I first saw it. Clearly I'm a sucker for typography in motion. But this video experiment for the song "flickermood 2.0" by FORSS turned me into a full-blown junkie.

OwensArtwork.com Gets Painted Anew

As a gift to my good friend and celebrated artist Matthew Owens, I offered to redesign his website. The previous iteration didn't reflect his sense of style or personality in the least. It felt like someone altogether different—a crafty homebody masquerading as the erudite, talented and slightly peculiar artist that many Chicagoans know and love.

Unfortunately, politics got in the way of launching the redesign and kept it in a holding pattern for the last year and a half. That is, until today. The new version of owensartwork.com launched with dark motifs of moody grays, painterly details, and a background scanned straight from a Jean Paul Gaultier shirt—nothing could be more Matthew than that.

Julie's Pseudo Birthday Gift

We all have tough months. Mine was February. The aftermath of the holidays, some unexpected expenses and a dip in freelance work left my wallet thinner than usual. I can handle living on a shoestring. However, my fiancée's birthday just happened to coincide with this perfect storm of financial wallops, leaving me empty handed in the gift department. Not good. So this year, in lieu of an actual gift, I designed her this five panel, vertical accordion folding card and she loved it.

Nikon D60

Shortly after the holidays I treated myself to a fancy new camera. The Nikon D60 entry level digital SLR had been calling me ever since I saw the photos taken by a fellow traveler on our trip to Peru. The deep, saturated colors that she captured on her D60 were all I needed to convince myself that dropping several hundred on the camera was an absolute necessity. Not to mention the fact that every designer needs a good camera, right?! See here, here and here.

Below is a selection of photos captured on the new DSLR since January. If you want to follow my photographic endeavors, here is the photostream.

Happy Holidays from Studiostein

Viva Las Incabators

A friend recently told me that in film making you will spend roughly six hours in the editing room for every one hour of completed footage. Over the past two weeks I had the opportunity to test this theory, and found that it is extraordinarily optimistic. Last month Julie and I took our first vacation in five years to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and along the way we got about two hours of footage. Editing it down to a thirty minute movie took me at least twenty hours. Granted, I'm a film making novice with a computer not optimized for video editing. However, I prefer to convince myself that the reason it took so long was because I did such a damn fine job on it. I hope you enjoy the finished product.