A few months ago, I posted the story behind the movie-geek Save the Date cards that I created with my fiancé/man-friend. As promised, here is part deux of “love meets dorkiness.” Our love of Quentin Tarantino movies (and movies in general) goes beyond our Save the Date cards and inspired the creation of our wedding website – BlineGowan.com. Okay, first thing’s f@*king last: if you didn’t already figure it out, “BlineGowan” is a combination of our last names – Blinebury and McGowan. If you ever meet Buckus the bulldog, you will notice that his tag indicates that his last name is BlineGowan!

The man-friend and I wanted to make our wedding website unique, so we designed it as if it was a promotional website for a movie entitled BlineGowan. It really played off our Save the Date cards well since that also felt like an advertisement for an upcoming movie. Each page of the website is styled like a different Quentin Tarantino movie. We decided that the home page of the website should resemble the most popular of Tarantino movies (see the screenshot above). If the typography and 10¢ “sticker” in the upper right-hand corner didn’t clue you in, here’s an extra hint: The last good movie (in my not-so-humble opinion) that John Travolta starred in.

The Premiere page of the website is styled after Kill Bill – Volumes One and Two. Did you hear that Volume Three has been announced? Holy crap! And yes, those are blood stain graphics.

We included a Special Features page to inform our guests of the yummy treats, delicious craft beers and spectacular entertainment that await them come November! Can you guess the Tarantino movie that inspired this page? It’s Tarantino’s directorial debut – the amazingly bloody Reservoir Dogs.  Wow, I feel really old after searching IMDB for this film – it came out in 1992?!

The crème de la crème of the wedding website has to be the Cast page. Styled after Jackie Brown (Point of Fact: The last good movie Robert DeNiro starred in), this page features my favorite rendering of the BlineGowan logo. I made sure to use accurate fonts from the actual movie titles. Figuring out the Jackie Brown font took some Googling, but I finally decided on Emfatick NF as the font of choice. The ‘l’ and ‘n’ characters required some extra detailing to correctly mimic the Jackie Brown title.

The Cast page lists our entire wedding party as characters from Tarantino films along with memorable quotes for said characters. And believe me, the characters were not chosen randomly! We spent a whole lot of time (more than I’d like to admit) deciding who should be who. Choosing characters for all of my bridesmaids was a particularly tough task as there are a lot more male characters than female. There are actually no women at all in Reservoir Dogs!

The decision to add character quotes meant that we would be adding a lot of profanity onto our wedding website. I’m going to go ahead and assume that *most* wedding websites do not feature profanity. But that’s how we roll son!

I’m proud to say that my Dad has been personally showing BlineGowan.com to his colleagues. My Dad’s Tarantino character is Joe Cabot from Reservoir Dogs, a perfect choice if I do say so myself considering that he is dry, sarcastic and – if nothing else – in charge.

And if my Dad thinks this wedding website is cool, then I guess we’ve done our job!

This past week, Beth Blinebury Design launched the first website for American artist Joni T. Johnson. If you don’t know Joni’s work, check it out immediately. BBD was honored to be commissioned to create a portfolio website for this amazing artist who touched so many lives with her extraordinary imagery.

Then I got to thinking about the amazing number of portfolio or “artist websites” that Beth Blinebury Design has out there in ol’ Internetland. BBD has created unique web presences for artists of all genres including illustration, painting, photography and digital media. The trick with any artist website is to create a design that does not overshadow the artwork itself but one that supports and compliments it. And it’s easy to find design inspiration in the clients we have!

It’s an amazing time to be making art because anyone with access to technology (something we should never take for granted, by the way) can see the work in ever-changing ways. The way in which we experience art has completely changed. Most people know what the greatest works of art look like but how many can say they’ve seen them in person? And does that even matter anymore? We can see anything we want at anytime and usually on little screens we pull out of our pockets! So how should art be displayed on the web? We try our best to create high-functioning portfolio websites for a variety of devices and ones that communicate the emotional tone of the artwork presented.

In 2010, Beth Blinebury Design worked with Philadelphia-based studio Philip Gabriel Photography on a rebranding project. We also launched a brand new website for this local studio that specializes in stunning, editorial-style imagery. The studio is lead by photographer Gabe Fredericks (a fellow Tyler alum). Let me tell you… these guys are busy every weekend shooting weddings all over this fine city and beyond. For the new Philip Gabriel Photography website, both the design and functionality had to be impeccable and communicate the experience of working with Gabe and his awesome crew. Check out the wedding gallery albums that offer first an album-style view of an entire wedding and then a more intimate viewing of individual images.

So how does the look of a website change when it’s viewed on an iPad? A portfolio site like the one we created for photographer Kim Budd looks as if it was made for the iPad! Of course, BBD designed it with mobile browsing in mind. Kim’s stunning, colorful images of the American landscape reference a long tradition of the photographic-road-trip. We wanted viewing her site to be like opening up a coffee table book – an intimate and classic photography experience!

For Philadelphia illustrator Jon Krause’s portfolio website, BBD had another visual problem to tackle: presenting Jon’s unique and imaginative illustrations in a simple, non-obstrusive gallery viewer while also creating a visual “tear sheet” section. For those of you not in the ad biz (watching a lot of Mad Men totally counts), a “tear sheet” is the term given to a physical page cut or torn from a publication that functions like a “proof” of an advertisement. Many commercial illustrators and photographers create tear sheets of their work used in conjunction with articles from magazines and newspapers. For Jon’s site, the tear sheet comes to life on the web page, allowing the user to easily shuffle through recent publications with the small movement of a mouse (or of a finger for those of you using Apple’s super cool Magic Trackpad!)

So in conclusion… Yowza, we’ve made a LOT of artist portfolio websites! And we look forward to making many, many more, so if you are an artist or know of one that needs a fresh and exciting web presence, contact Beth Blinebury Design!