This post is long overdue, but a few months ago I began working on, artmonkeyworld.com, a website for a good friend of mine, David Carr. He is a local, Belleville, IL, artist, painter and all around good guy. He wanted to update his site to showcase his artwork.

Dave’s previous site was something that he put together and was a pain to add new items to because it all had to be done by hand. Each new image he had to resize twice, one for the full size image and another for the thumbnail.

Backend

This new site is using WordPress for the CMS and art section. These are my usual tools of the trade, so working them into his new website was a breeze.

One big problem with the old site was the sites code itself, it was a mess. So, I came in and did my usual CSS driven site.

Design

The design was a concept that Dave and I brainstormed over a weekend. The idea was to have the site look like it was hand-drawn on a piece of rough, beat up paper. Dave supplied his original version, but it didn’t really come out like I had envisioned. So, I went to the drawing board and came up with the site you see now, which Dave loved.

The page background was created by me using a combination of Photoshop brushes (downloaded from many places online), textures and many other adjustments. The hardest part of the design was is because I had to make it so the page can expand in height with the various length of content. Dave then came up with the sketches to overlay on the page.

We wanted to play off the monkey/jungle theme as well, which is where the grass and wood comes from. The grass was just the simple grass brush that comes with Photoshop. For the page headers I originally had the idea to make it look like a tree branch with the headings carved into them. Dave thought this was a bit too much, so I then came up with the engraved wood nailed up.

The logo was done by Dave, but then I came up with the color scheme, gradients and glow to spruce things up a bit.

Overall this is one of the more complex designs in terms of the backend code, but it’s one of my favorites.

Please pay Dave a visit and check out his great art.