Bloom Design Website
For this project, I worked with interior decorator Cheryl Bloom to develop her brand and website. After walking through one of her current projects and photos of past projects we talked about some of the things she considered unique about her work. A couple things stood out to me through this process: Cheryl did not shy away from color and to best represent her work I wanted to use large format images.
After quite a few iterations on the logo, we landed on using the concept of a color palette for the logo. The typeface was selected for its long ascenders and natural texture which matched much of the elements found in her work.
We wanted to make a big first impression and after some sketching I decided on a large format background slideshow that would run a set of her most recent work in the background. Additionally, to allow the slideshow to run seamlessly the website would live on a single page with the pages transitioning over top of the slideshow. This was tricky because we wanted to use WordPress for the CMS which does not have the structure to support single page sites.
To get around the WordPress challenge, I ended up utilizing the iframes for each of the pages. The iframes were loaded as part of the homepage but lived as separate pages on the website. The pages could then be edited and managed as usual by the client without issue.
Additional Thoughts
The project was not my first foray into WordPress development but the use of iframes with that platform was certainly not standard practice. From this, I got to understand some nuances of problem-solving and front-end development that I hadn’t run into previously. Of note, this was shortly before responsive design was starting to make any big waves so the website was a static width. I think if I were to tackle this project today I would likely approach it as a more traditional portfolio in some senses but retain the emphasis on presenting her work as a large scale first impression.