Last month heralded the completion of my latest freelance project: the website for my longtime friend and musician, Natti Vogel. I’ve done quite a few projects for Natti over the years, including show flyers and the album artwork for his “Hello EP” release.

Natti website was my first serious collaboration with another designer, which was a really rewarding learning process. I worked with my occasional partner-in-design, Evan Rosen (aka. Squidelephant), whose design strengths run perpendicular to mine. His aesthetic sensibilities definitely lean towards vintage printmaking, ornate typography, and graphic black and white art, whereas I’m all about illustrative, glossy, neon-colored craziness.

Moodboard

Evan and I each started the design process by separately compiling a moodboard of what we each had in mind for Natti’s site. Natti came to the table with a lot of great ideas, and he definitely has a trademark sort of atmosphere and attitude that we used as inspiration via handmade paper textures, a sophisticated color palette, and a great series of photos taken by Adrian Nina
In one of my correspondences with Natti, I listed some possible visual cues:

“…deep dark muted fire-y colors, speakeasies, wine and absinthe, soft texture/grunge, black ink/fountain pens, old-world coffeeshops, pinstriped suits, 1920′s, handwritten elements, warm summer twilight (am thinking of a particular scene from the Virgin Suicides, actually), etc.”

Design

After getting Natti’s feedback, Evan and I took the two moodboards, incorporating the best elements from each concept, and each began work on a rough website layout. For the second round, we traded designs, tweaked, adjusted, added, subtracted and then traded once more. At this point the design began to come into focus, so we chose the stronger version and set our sights to perfect it.

One of the more interesting elements of the design was the “aqua-smoke”, which is the beautiful, nebulous glow that we added around Natti’s photo. A mutual friend of Natti’s and mine, who is sound-color synesthetic, had mentioned that Natti’s music looks like “aqua-smoke” to her and that our design captured the way it appears to her, which is a pretty amazing coincidence.

All in all, I’m incredibly happy with how it turned out, and as we built the site on a WordPress framework, Natti is able to update and edit the site as needed, with little guidance from us. It was an asset to have Evan on board for his typography genius and knowledge of UI, in combination with my sensitivity to color and texture, and it was a great experience to collaborate with another designer.

Take a look at the live site at NattiVogel.com and let me know what you think!

Web designers are much more than pixel pushers. They have a wealth of knowledge about the Web and how users interact with it. They also understand design techniques, including grid systems, white space, color theory and much more. Treating designers as pixel pushers wastes their design experience.

It is therefore wasteful to micro-manage by asking them to “make the logo bigger” or to “move that 3 pixels to the left.” By doing so, you are reducing their role to that of a software operator and wasting the wealth of experience they bring.

- Paul Boag, “10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites”