In addition to my graphic design work, I’ve also worked as a writer and editor. I maintain a separate online portfolio for my writing, and recently overhauled it to bring it up to modern website best practices, and generally refresh its look. You can see the result here.
I built the redesigned site in WordPress, using the Uncode theme (the same theme that powers this graphic design site). This is my second project using Uncode, and thus far, I’ve found it fairly flexible and easy to use.
One of the more challenging design problems came not from Uncode, but from the imagery involved. For the header image at top, the natural choice was to use “A Dell in Devonshire,” the painting by Myles Birket Foster that appeared on the cover of Lorien Lost, the novel I published years ago, which is the focal point of the site. However, I don’t own a high-resolution scan of the painting, and I found nothing in public domain online except low-resolution versions that looked horribly pixelated. I considered using some other image, but my initial search didn’t yield anything that suited the book very well, so instead I opted to create my own image based on the M.B. Foster painting—something that looks different enough that it doesn’t look like a poorly done copy, but similar enough that it echoes the book cover. The result is the rather impressionistic landscape you see here, which I created digitally, in Corel Painter.
