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 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 Since I got better, I took a look at my site here and realized things were way out of date and that my skill level had advanced far beyond what it previously was.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.

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.