Welcome to withStyle Design!
Cutting edge design and elegant functionality, coupled with a clean, professional look is what withStyle is all about. Bringing nearly a decade of graphics and programming experience to Kelowna's graphics and web design scene, withStyle is one of the freshest design studios in the Okanagan. All areas of graphics art are covered from apparel to print. Business cards, promotional posters, logos, vinyl lettering for company cars--I've done it all, and I can even do t-shirt, button or album art designs if you've got a great band in need of some snappy new merch.
withStyle Design consists of just one person; a man with an eye for design, an ear to hear what you need and a brain to put the two together. Many designs fall short of their potential by complicating things with akward navigation, cluttered layouts and uninteresting imagery. Not here. Ease of use is one of the most important parts of web design but often seems to be mysteriously absent from the designers' minds. Ease of use comes simply from a clever structuring of the web site's navigation, balanced use of white space to separate different aspects of the design and subtle use of graphical techniques to more greatly emphasize the effect of the white space.
Nobody likes ugly. I sympathize greatly on this one. I fancy myself a perfectionist of sorts, and as such; work into the late hours of the night just to make sure my designs are nice on the eyes. I often consider the psychological effects of color when designing--this site for instance, is orange; a color known to invoke excitement and joy. It is important to think of the details like these because if, for example, I had designed this site to be more red it could stimulate agression and if it were more yellow it could stimulate displeasement. Shapes are just as important; the 'rounded corners' shenanigans that followed the emergence of Web 2.0 design practices came from it's relation to calmness and open-mindedness.
Web 2.0 is an interesting phenomena as it strives to simplify some of the most complicated of concepts. This brings very advanced functionality to a wider, less internet-savvy portion of the web browsing population, which not coincidentally happens to be a fairly large portion of the overall internet traffic. It's a simple fact that simplification broadens the appeal. Having thousands of pages of content is all well and good, but if you group related content together and create a way to intuitively navigate it your customers will be much happier and much more likely to find the information they were looking for.
Whether you are right here in Kelowna or somewhere in the outer reaches of the Okanagan, please consider withStyle for all your creative needs. Even international contracts are welcome, Paypal is accepted. Just send an email with as much detail as possible on what exactly it is that you want and I'll do my best to impress!
Examples
withStyle has covered a broad range of projects and continues to offer the most effective and unique designs possible. Some of these projects will be showcased here in this regularily updated examples section. To view an example all you need to do is click the corresponding orange title bar and a convenient little box will slide out containing relevant pictures and content to each project. If you are looking for a particular example that isn't present, feel free to use the contact form and withStyle Design will do it's best to accomodate.
Nerd Culture
Nerd Culture is a side project of mine that I needed a logo for; it needed to be something simple, but memorable--something to represent the dynamic nature of the Nerd Culture project and the topics it covers. I wanted a fluid look of sorts, so I chose to model the design after the powerful and dynamic look of tidal waves.
The Dave Favell Band
Dave Favell needed a logo for his band to be used on a promotional poster and he needed it right away, so I put together this speedy vector in just under a half hour. It really doesn't take long to put together a simple vector like that, but it can be challenging to cram the design phase into such a short period of time. I pulled it off smoothly as I always do though, and got a slick looking classic baseball style logo right on schedule; just what he wanted!
Up Beat Cafe
Up Beat Cafe wanted a very functional website for very little money--start up can be an expensive time--so I did my best to create for them the most feature-rich website I possibly could while still adhering to their small budget. The design includes a very easy to use Specials and Soup Of The Day editing system and a Google Maps box to show their location with comments and a photo gallery currently in the works.
Sui Generis
In my free time I also like to make electronic music. My newest album, CheCheChe, needed some album art so I put this quick mockup together in Photoshop. It's one of many possible designs I'm contemplating at the moment--you'll just have to wait and see how it ends up.
The Regals
As their site says, "The Regals band believes in the magic and spirit of early Rock & Roll and they are committed to presenting a show which captures what it was all about." What they needed was a site that could represent their love of the 50s and showcase audio clips of their performances. Neon-like effects were used on the lettering in the header to give them a 50s feel and the blue color scheme was chosen becase, well...it's The Regals; royal blue just seemed to be the right color for such a name.
Some important features to them were to have a Jukebox to play mp3s of their songs and a calender system that would list concert dates and could open up a posters when clicked on. Asynchronous Javascript was used to reduce the bandwidth footprint of pageloads and an XSPF Playlist generating PHP script was created with support for ID3 tag extraction and album cover display, but album covers ended up not being used.
Terry MacGillivray
Terry wanted a clean and professional looking site with a hint of vintage style. He had one particular picture taken from s balcony of the Peachland sunset, which he wanted as a focal point of the site, so the header of the layout was constructed with that in mind and the rest of the site was designed to be relatively minimal so as to no distract attention from the picture and the content.
On the programming side of things Terry wanted to have a listing system he could use to advertise the homes he has for sale. It needed to be easy to use and support image uploads for photo galleries. What better for the job than Drupal and the Point Homes plugin?
GP2X Guide
GP2X Guide is a video game community website for users of the Gamepark GP2X handheld game unit. For this design something bold but functional was needed, to match the personality of the gaming device itself. The curve shape was used to emphasize it's uniqueness and to provide more screen space to display the device itself in full, while the leaves and vines behind the unit were used to draw more attention to it.
It was decided early on that it would predominantly use orange as that was a common color used in application skins on the device including the skin for the main operating system. The color scheme needed to be exciting but, at the same time, calm and relaxed so bold and subtle variations of orange and brown were used to bring out the excitement of the concept while keeping the content subtle with the use of browns.
Ubervoice
übervoice is a sort of online business card for Mark Theobald, a voice actor. He wanted something very simple that didn't distract at all from the point of the website; his audio samples. The focus of this particular project was very much in creating the best audio player to play the samples in an easy, understandable way that was very easy to edit and place for Mark, as he isn't particularily so internet savvy.
The audio player was made entirely with actionscript in flash and was programmed to accept special arguements for the filename and title to make it's usage very basic. An FTP browsing section was also need for easy download of audio samples, so that was created with some basic PHP programming.
withStyle v2
withStyle didn't just start out as some major business investment, it was once just a hobby of an enthusiastic designer who wanted to make the web a better, more exciting place. Over time it grew and it became clear that some Web 2.0 shenanigans were in order. An edit-in-place content management system was created to ease updating of the site and an RSS news feed was created to provide useful insight for other designers or any hopeful website-needing web surfers that happen to peruse the site.
The site was a major upgrade from the previous and short-lived design that really only served to work as an online business card, as it was not optimized for Search Engine placement at all. It didn't need to be though, as withStyle back then was just a hobby. As years progress though, hobbies always seem to evolve into something more--a specialization, albeit an unpaid one until you decide to put in the effort to take proper advatage of it. Considering that graphics design is a more interesting and suitable career choice than pumping gas or flipping burgers it seemed to be the right choice to take that next step.
What can I do for you?
- Provide a clean and intuitive interface allowing for easy navigation using many Web 2.0 design concepts.
- Program web sites ranging from small scale business card or brochure equivalents to large-scale Social Networking and eCommerce web sites.
- Create advanced components for handling and manipulation of data streams such as binary mode file manipulations from simple ID3 and cover art extraction and injection for MP3s to full scale GD image manipulations supporting cropping, scaling, rotations, alpha blending, and watermark embedding.
- Design themes and create custom plugins for many established Content Management Systems such as Wordpress or Drupal.
- Work with you to optimize your content for the best possible search engine placement.
- Make inspired and creative art for posters, business cards, vinyl lettering, logos, promotional flyers, brochures, album art, t-shirts--if it's art then I can make it.
Consider withStyle for all your creative needs!
For a quote, please fill out the contact form with any details on what it is you want or contact me in any of the other forms listed below. The more details you can provide, the more accurate the quote will be.
Instant Messaging
- MSN: stephenbelanger@hotmail.com
- AIM: StephenBelanger7
- Google Talk: StephenBelanger.withStyle@gmail.com
Voice
- Cell: 250-575-1154
- Fax: 250-764-8862