Intertidalist
The intertidal zone is where the land and the ocean hold equal sway. When the tide is in, the intertidal zone is inundated with salty water and the sea anemones and goose barnacles feed. When the tide is out, birds and crabs swoop and scuttle in for their feasts.
The idea behind Intertidalist is that the services I offer exist in the “intertidal zone” of business and technology, smoothly bridging dual worlds. Sea and land, geek and user, business and tech, development and management.
Find out what makes me a good Intertidalist on the
About page.
Design of Intertidalist
I’m a seasoned web developer, but other than some lessons in cartography, my background doesn’t include much in the way of graphic design. I’m great at translating a design in a mock-up into a working website, but coming up with the mock-up is a different story. That is art.
That said, artistic endeavors are fun to try on my own time. This website is the result of one such trial and error process.
I designed the logo for Intertidalist after spending about a day with different design ideas, fonts, and iconography. In the end, I used a combination of two commercially free fonts for the logo text:
Beyno Typeface and
Carrington. The primary color for the logo was inspired by intertidal zone water on a sunny afternoon. And the Fibonacci spiral is reminiscent of the natural spirals found in the intertidal zone, like those of waves, shells, and plants.
The logo was built using
Inkscape, a free and open source alternative to vector graphic programs like Adobe Illustrator. I built the animated version of the logo using
GIMP, a free alternative to raster graphic programs like Adobe Photoshop.
These two programs were used for other graphics and photos on the website, as well, including the two photos I used for the parallax effect on the home page. Aside from the Font Awesome icons and derived graphics, all graphics and photos on the site are my own.
The color scheme for the site is
one I selected by seeding the
Coolors color palette generator with the main logo color. To generate darker and lighter variations, I plugged the main palette colors into the monochromatic color palette generator provided by
Paletton.
As described in greater detail below, much of the site design is largely based on a free WordPress theme. I altered the theme to repurpose and update some of the design elements and to enhance the functionality of those elements to better suit my content needs.
This was a fun and engaging project to design. But, for your website or projects, should you need the services of a graphic designer for branding, imagery, or general graphic design, I am happy to recommend colleagues!
Behind the Curtain
This website is built with
WordPress and uses the
Zerif Lite theme as a foundation. The theme provided good mobile and design foundations, but didn’t meet all of my needs. Some additional customizations were done to change color schemes, to move design components into new templates to be used in new ways, and to better suit branding components.
It is often the case in web development that you can start with a reusable component to get 90% of the way to your goal. The remaining 10% is where customization can transform a stock design into something branded and more personal. As long as the reusable component has relatively low overhead (i.e. it isn’t unnecessarily complicated or an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach), starting with an existing framework, theme, or other component saves time and money.
As with my own projects, I always look for ways to meet my clients’ needs with inventive solutions that optimize efficiency and effectiveness. If you’d like to discuss potential solutions to reach your goals, please
contact me. You can also learn more about the
services I offer and my
background.
