Morning Glory House

This is a piece I’ve done about a year ago, but never wound up adding to my portfolio. The design was made for Morning Glory House which is an elderly retirement home near Kalamazoo, Michigan. They were looking for a solution to create and manage pages so they could easily update the website for their business as well as a floral themed design to match the name of their business.

For this custom wordpress theme development I used the thematic wordpress framework by Ian Stewart to cut down on cross browser inconsistencies and made a general layout.

The Site URL can be found at MGH Seniors.

This is a wordpress theme design I recently made in Photoshop. I was having an inspired day and simply had to do some design work. I really wanted to work with a grain pattern on a darker themed website, and try to lean away from some of the full width containers that I have on a lot of my designs.

After getting some sketching done and working with a few options for the grid I got to photoshopping and wound up with this design. I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. Keeping wordpress in mind, I started to think the design would be great for a wordpress theme.

For now this is going to sit in my portfolio folder, but once I’m done with some other projects I’m on, this piece will definitely be in line for wordpress theme development and I have to say I’m quite excited about it.

this is under construction

It’s been a while since I posted on this site since the move over to Design Relay but as things turned out I got a little sick for a while and got really behind posting content over there. Since I got better, I took a look at my site here and realized things were way out of date and that my skill level had advanced far beyond what it previously was. I wanted to give a fresh new look to my site, one that accurately previewed my skill level. With that in mind I decided to build a new design for boylecreations.

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t have enough time to put out tutorials at Design Relay but I’ll be getting to that again very soon now that this design is out. I spent quite a bit of time on it and hand coded the theme from the ground up with photoshop and panics Coda text editor.

Now that all this is taken care of I can start posting articles here as well, and represent myself the way I’ve always wanted. I’ll be starting a new marketing campaign soon to promote boylecreations and designrelay as well as coming out with a lot more new content as well as working on some custom wordpress themes for sale.

I hope everyone enjoys the new look of things and I’m really excited to be writing again!

I’ve recently decided that I wanted to seperate my personal blog from a more informational and design related one. I’ve wanted to get into working with screencasts and tutorials to provide information for my clients and anyone out there who may find as much use from it as I do from many of the other blogs out there. For the time being, this blog will be carrying more personal information, (though some work related may still come in).

If you’d like to check out the new website the url is Design Relay

Hope you find something useful!

Just the other day I joined up in an art competition at the Center for New Media in Kalamazoo. The idea was that designers would collaborate with other designers to come up with a three piece campaign that helped promote renewable energy instead of offshore drilling. Obviously inspired by the recent disaster with the BP oil spill, I teamed up with local designers Amy O’donnell and Andy Peninger to create our campaign.

Rather then focus on one type of energy over another we kind of bent the rules a bit and attempted a campaign that was more towards promoting people to come visit a website where all the information was collected. We made up a fictional company called ESAmerica (Environmtal Support of America) and I designed a website for them and worked on a logo for them with Andy Peninger. Amy went on to work on a Propaganda poster that showed an awesome image about who was to blame on the matter of the oil spill. Andy then went on to create a billboard with some strong typography that said “Spill Your Thoughts”.

All in all it was a lot of fun, but we were all on really tight schedules with work so we didn’t get to do as much preparation as we’d like.

On the other hand though, we DID get Honorable Mention and a pretty high score overall afterwards. So while we didn’t really win any cash for our efforts, getting the honorable mention was really cool. Someone obviously liked our work so we’re going to have it displayed with all the rest at the Center for New Media in downtown Kalamazoo at the next local Art Hop.

As for the website design I made for ESAmerica, you can take a look here or in my portfolio page. I’m looking into doing a 3 part tutorial later on how I brainstormed, planned, designed it and how to turn it into a wordpress theme for personal use later. But thats for another day. Enjoy!

This was originally a design that I made when I was volunteering as a Web Designer for the Arcadia Commons West project in Kalamazoo, Mi.  We didn’t wind up using this design but I’ve had it shelved away in some old folders and decided to take another look at it and convert it to something more useful. I was using some images from SXC.HU that had a sort of community feel to them and one of them reminded me of Soccer. Long story short, I transformed the design into this wordpress design for a fictional soccer league. All work was done with Photoshop with wordpress in mind. When I get around to coding it I’ll probably work outside of Thematic this time and work with HTML5 since the functionality isn’t incredibly demanding.

This is a design I recently made in Photoshop, yet again meant for wordpress, but it can be easily moved to another Content Management System if necessary. The design was intended to have a clean and professional corporate look. I don’t see a lot of themes that have their navigation as part of a floating container so I experimented with that idea and I really liked how it turned out. I am currently turning this into a wordpress theme in HTML5 as well, which will be free for download and demo once I’ve ironed everything out.

This was a design I made while I was in College. I was aiming for the look and feel of a corporate website that was created with the sole purpose of selling a single product and offering support. In this case the product was an Idea I had for a social networking management application. I never really got a chance to write out a full description of what the product would be like but I will come back to it again in the future and finish that as well as come up with a working logo for this fictioal business.

As far as the interface is concerned the website was intended to have more of a single page type of view with relatively few changes from page to page, and the navigation is ready for the jQuery plugin “Lava Lamp” and would be ready for use in most content management systems.

Back when I was in College at the Center for New Media, there were a few semesters where a lot of work was passing through the school and having to be routed elsewhere. It was the idea of a few of the teachers at the school to have some of the web students get together and create a site, NOT attached to Kalamazoo Valley Community College to handle some of this work. While the idea was sound and it lasted for a while, the team largely had different agendas and were unable to meet enough to get the idea together. During that time however I came up for this design for the group. This was before I was working with PHP and WordPress so I didn’t really know to have a comments and post section designed for it but there is room for a content slider, and animated navigation with jQuery and could very easily be adapted to that platform.

This is a design I made that was to reflect what I thought a fansite of VnV Nation would look like. The inspiration for this exercise was their song “The Farthest Star”, however it wound up turning into a very dark looking design. I added a neat little section on the right for purchasing tracks like in iTunes, so that its full features would include blogging, forums and a little bit of ecommerce.

All imagery used in this exercise representing VnV Nation, while modified is copyrighted by and owned by them or their prospective photographers.

Rivizion is a design I made for a fictional framework that’s intended use was for enhancing other Flash frameworks. I wound up creating an entire writeup on this software for a writing class I was taking as well. All colors, imagery and typography were used to resemble the design of Adobes Flash product to help communicate its purpose. The design is wordpress and e-commerce ready.

This is a design for a fictional construction company I dubbed Terra meaning “of or relating to earth and its inhabitants”. Designed to reflect the ideas of Arcosanti, I wanted to create an earth friendly and anti urban sprawl idea. The result of that exercise was the logo for Terra and an entire package identity. This is simply the website design that went with the package. The remaining pieces will be uploaded to my portfolio as time permits.

A design I made specifically for a pitch practice to Ann Taylor for one of my classes. As part of the pitch I outlined my abilities as well as my creative process. In that outline, I used this design, which was custom designed thematically for the presentation as the proxy. Leannah Fabrics was designed for conversion to Magento e-Commerce system specifically and utlizes a color scheme that helps to appeals to female fashion and represents the look and feel of the Ann Taylor Loft.

This is a wordpress portfolio design I made during the last semester of school. Like some of the other portfolio designs I’ve done I made sure that it was ready for blogging on a Content Management System, as well as ready for a Content slider to preview work.  However, unlike some of the others I had designed this one to have few different view types. The majority of the pages are relatively similar with centered content with a large image and a viewable gallery.