Elliot Jay Stocks » Portfolio

Rhys Marsh: Dulcima

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:03:38 +0000

Dulcima is an entirely different album than its predecessor, The Fragile State Of Inbetween, and this needed to be reflected in the artwork. Rhys wanted to go for something all black, but to stop it looking a little too plain, we dropped in some very subtle textures and tiny details from photographs taken by Nils Kristian Thompson Eikeland.

However, it was important to establish a connection between Rhys’ albums in spite of their differences, so the same typeface was used — the beautiful Fontin — along with the same basic layout for the interior elements. The photo at the bottom of this page shows the two albums together to illustrate their consistency, with Dulcima placed at the top.

The album is released in October on Termo Records and you can buy it from Burning Shed.

Fusion Ads

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:39:05 +0000

In addition to the new site, Fusion Ads need an ‘advertiser kit’: a PDF they send out to potential advertisers that describe the way the process works, the fees involved, how to create a campaign, etc. Although a PDF already existed, it needed rethinking completely to present the information in a good-looking, easy-to-digest way, and it also needed to reflect the brand guidelines I’d developed for the new site.

Along with the advertiser kit, I also created some simple Fusion Ads business cards.

Christopher Calicott

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:18:31 +0000

After my work on Vegasaurus, Christopher asked me if I’d like to create a personal blog for him; a place where he could collect his various sources of inspiration and write about the things that interest him. I love working with Christopher so was I was very happy to oblige, and it meant I could experiment with coaxing WordPress into a tumblelog: something I’d been wanting to do for quite some time.

The site allows Christopher to publish a variety of different content and it styles the posts accordingly, using nothing more complicated than WordPress’ categories feature and some automatically-generated class names. Using forward-thinking CSS3 to give the site some subtle visual enhancements and a touch of jQuery to keep the navigation minimal, the result is a minimal but versatile blog.

Vegasaurus

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:31:36 +0000

Directory sites have a tendency to look rather boring, don’t they? Not so with Vegasaurus. When Christopher Calicott commissioned me to create the design and front-end templates for his project, we agreed that the site should look as vibrant and exciting as the city it’s serving. Aimed at both residents and tourists, Vegasaurus will be the place to find out what’s going on in Las Vegas.

Please note: these images are taken from the Photoshop mock-ups. Anything and everything could change. Also, the dinosaur character was not illustrated by me.

Fusion Ads

Elliot Jay Stocks — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:18:02 +0000

A leading ad network in the web design community, Fusion Ads display targeted ads that are not only relevant to the audience, but also look beautiful at the same time. Having been a member of the network for some time (you can see Fusion Ads on my blog), and with so many really great designers as fellow publishers, I jumped at the chance to get even closer to the company and help them redefine the way they present themselves online.

The new site replaced their previous one-pager and goes into a great deal of depth about the services they offer, with the aim of bringing in new advertisers. Adorned with a host of CSS3 features to achieve some real visual polish, this was a dream project, as Fusion’s visitors are almost entirely Safari users and hence get to see all of these enrichments. As well as what’s currently live, I created several other pages, which will be launched over time as the network evolves.

In addition to the website, I also created printed materials for Fusion Ads, including the advertisers’ pack and company business cards.

Virgin Group

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:31:41 +0000

When the Virgin Group undertook the mammoth of task of creating a new website to house all of the various Virgin companies, they commissioned several designers and illustrators to create imagery for each of the different sections. My area of responsibility was the ‘People & Planet’ section, so I produced an image that attempted to concisely embody the spirit of positive human interaction with Earth.

ProNet Hosting

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:56:56 +0000

I was contacted by the company and asked to embark on a redesign of their existing website. They wanted something striking to put them up there with the big boys, so I tried a few different radical approaches. In the end, it was decided that the site should instead not be too experimental and instead simply offer a more modern feel while retaining the core structure of the existing site.

Sourhaze: EP 1

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:38:36 +0000

For the release of my debut EP, I decided to create something super-simple: a one-page site that lets the music speak for itself. A Flash-based preview player, a wee bit of info, and a lovely big ‘buy’ button.

Better Place Recordings

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:24:57 +0000

Sparse, minimal, and spacious – like so much of the label’s musical output – the Better Place Recordings website is home to the label’s news, its releases, its artists, and their various appearances in the press. Nestled inside the artists section is a series of artist-branded pages that eliminate the need for them each to have their own site (their domains point to their respective BPR pages) and the whole thing is controlled with ease thanks to the heavily-customised WordPress back-end.

Rhys Marsh: singles

Elliot Jay Stocks — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:25:06 +0000

All 3 were available as free digital downloads and I designed the cover for each. As with the other Rhys Marsh releases, I created the artwork using photographs taken by Nils Kristian Thompson Eikeland.