In April, 2009, I decided that I wanted to start traveling more. Not one to do things halfway, I decided to pick up my life and my business and start living a mobile lifestyle, running my business from the road and living in a new country every 4 months. Exile Lifestyle was born!

Part of the inspiration for this was the desire to write more (I worked as a columnist for a while back in the day) and to document my lifestyle design exploits. I needed a good website to display all the content I would be creating accessibly and attractively.

I decided to create a minimal site, one that is super-easy to navigate and hard to get lost on. Lots of white space, colorful, attractive photography (courtesy of Cris Dobbins) and dramatic-yet-simple typography were key to creating the look and feel that I wanted.

I aimed to keep the style of writing fairly casual to counteract the stylish-but-regimented feeling of the site, and I wanted to make sure that the color scheme was reminiscent of the simple black/white/red of a nice letterpressed poster design, but with colors that are toned down (desaturated reds, gray blacks). To help establish the visual hierarchy, I overlapped clean white ‘panels,’ with the navigation on top, followed by the main content area and the scene-setting sidebar on the very bottom.

To flesh out the content and provide extra value to my readers, I also created an Exile Reading List, which contains feeds from some of my favorite websites and blogs, all cataloged cleanly and concisely (and updated automatically on the hour).

Kristin Norris, owner of geo•gia massage, was in the midst of upgrading her business to incorporate personal training as well as massage. She came to me to revitalize her branding and build her a new website. This new site would have drastically more functionality than her previous site, including a CMS backend that she can use to update her pages and blogs without touching the code and an online scheduler/payment processor so that her clients can make appointments online and see exactly what times she has available. See the live website here.

To achieve the results she requested, I built her a site on top of the WordPress CMS, and used a third-party scheduling rich Internet application to dynamically handle her scheduling and payment processing.

The University of Southern California’s Public Diplomacy Department needed a website built. This website was to serve as the online edition of their brand new magazine, the aptly-named Public Diplomacy Magazine. See the live site here.

The site needed to be a fully interactive online magazine, so I based the navigation on a category system that used the table of contents as a foundation. The articles and pages are all dynamic, and the PDM staff are able to swap out new issues as necessary, as the entire site is built on the WordPress platform.

Jazz singer/songwriter Marilyn Scott was in need of a static webpage to promote a limited-edition special offer to her fans. Her management company wanted something that kept to the Marilyn brand, while at the same time branching out a bit to add some freshness to the look. To achieve this I started with an image of Marilyn, worked in an antiqued-wallpaper background with colors that are resplendent of her image, and used some modern, floating panels to display the information, combining the traditional and oldschool with the sleek and edgy. Compact MP3 players were added so that visitors could test out a song before downloading it.

A fellow designer named John Coulter asked me to develop in Flash a site he was designing for a company that builds lithium-ion-powered scooters. I agreed immediately, and after seeing his design I was happy that I did.

The name of the game with this site was to accurately translate what John had designed into Flash, while at the same time adding functionality to the buttons and backgrounds, making the site more interactive (clickable images, for example), and adding forms where necessary. You can view the live site here.

After their deciding on a simple, easy to read but very basic logo, I was asked by the nvohk management team to design a website for their brand. The logo made the project somewhat of a challenge, but I was able to take the clean black and white look and expand it to include an outdoorsy feel while still taking into account ease of navigation.

I decided to take a series of photos that were provided by the company and placed them in a frame. This allowed me to use the photos as a kind of centerpiece that the rest of the website ‘grew’ from, while allowing for a tasteful incorporation of the logo. The space below the central image became the content area, while the navigation stretched down the right side.

As the other pages were designed, a typographic and visual language began to develop and all of the elements evolved cohesively.

Health industry entrepreneur, Kristin Norris, tasked me with branding and building a website for her message therapy business, geo•gia massage. Because her business is special within the field – providing mobile (on-site) massage therapy to businesses and individuals – and because she uses eco-friendly supplies, I suggested a minimalistic, clean, very simple site.

I made use of a concise and calming palette of a certain shade of green, a handful of grays and a fuchsia, while the rest of the site is a very crisp, clean white. The information needed to be presented clearly and without distraction. A simple header/sub-header typographic system was established.

To make the site as practical as it was beautiful, an online appointment form was added, along with links to geo•gia’s Yelp account and Kristin’s health and wellness blog.

The young and incredibly ambitious gentlemen at Factory Green contacted me about giving their expanding business’ online presence a makeover. Their older was very static, and because their customer-base is largely college students and twenty-somethings, they needed a bit more movement and flair.

The biggest challenge for this site was coming up with a consistent form of navigation that would serve as a visual reference for visitors, while still being flexible enough to seamlessly integrate into the e-commerce sections of their site.

The solution ended up being a solid bar across the site which moves up or down depending on what’s being displayed. When more sub-navigation menus are necessary, the main navigation bar moves up to make room (the sub-navigation buttons have their own, very visual, look).

Aesthetically, the site was redesigned with dramatic, san-serif typography and close-cropped photography of the products in order to appeal to the young, style-conscious crowd.

DataFusion Technologies, Inc., creator of law firm accounting products and services, came to me looking for an aesthetic overhaul for their B2B website. Their site was beginning to look very dated and they wanted something with a bit more aesthetic appeal, while still maintaining a professional feel and ease of use.

Some visual cues were taken from other B2B companies like Sun, Cisco and IBM, all who have appealing websites that intuitively present a vast amount of information in many different categories. Making use of tabs and a rotating image as the dominant visual element helped to sort the most used and pertinent information, while a horizontal dropdown menu with only a handful of primary sections organized the rest of the site content.

The website I built for my first design studio endeavor, 2and2is5 Design, was simple and nearly static, but it kept the brand consistent and displayed my work in an intuitive fashion.