CLIENT: Dame Media / Adriana Abascal
PROJECT: Non-Traditional WordPress Custom Theme
www.adrianaabascal.com

I’m a huge fan of Nick Bantock and collage/assemblage in general. When I was approached to do the design for the Adriana Abascal site, one of the main goals was to provide a glimpse into this woman’s glamorous life. My immediate idea was to provide an actual entrance: a digital assemblage of the different aspects of her life. I was so excited when Jennifer at Dame Media loved the concept — I’ve been wanting to do a site like this for a long time.

This site presented two main challenges. The first was from a design perspective: we wanted to have this assemblage and a kind of “real-world”, personal feel to the site, but we also needed to make sure that the site felt glamorous and refined… this is, after all, a site for a woman who graced the pages of Vogue. We walked that fine line by using clean, modern fonts and sleek, real-world items and textures. The second challenge was from a functionality standpoint: we needed to build a very non-traditional theme for use with WordPress. They needed to be able to manage their own pictures and elements from the background, we needed floating sub-navigation and erratically-placed divs, and the whole system needed to be multilingual. Fortunately, I had great help from Chris Lohman and the excellent qTranslate plugin. In the end, we were able to sort it all out and they’ve got a very untraditional site that they can manage with basically no knowledge of HTML whatsoever!