Rodney Butcher

http://rodneybutcher.com

Company Background

Rodney Butcher is an award winning commercials director, with over 20 years experience creating high profile films for household brands including Kenwood, Jaguar, Galaxy and Whiskas.

Brief

With such vibrant video and photographic work, our ideas were synchronous with Rod's: design a site that works like an art gallery and doesn't compete visually with the content. To this end, we focused on simplicity of use, elegance and a symmetrical design that would frame the artwork at all times, whether in a gallery or viewing a single piece.

Solution

The site we designed with Rod is easy to use, as simple as possible, and offers a gentle fluid experience to users. By using fades between pages, and a simple text based navigation system the eye is never drawn from the artwork. We built a custom flash player with the same principles in mind. To display content information we used jQuery to hide the text until the user mouses-over it. Keen to use a more elaborate font than the standard web-safe set, we also installed the Cufon script, allowing us to use the font of the client's choice within the site navigation, without the problems of using text as an image (which is poor for SEO and future updates).

"I hate ‘fussy’ websites, so when I finally decided to have one built, my brief was very clear: “I’d like something clean and simple, yet stylish and easy to use...maybe something along the lines of a photo gallery.” Well, all I can say is, I’m delighted I took my business to Alpha Wave. They listened, then delivered in spades...on time and on budget! Excellent!"

Rodney Butcher, Film Director