Damian Lobato
Damian Lobato is a dancer and teacher of Argentine Tango. Damian is in an unusual position; he feels no need for his website to bring him new business. That's because the nature of his work means that it comes by personal connnections and recommendations.
This put us in a fun position when we sat down to think about his site. Of course he wanted to offer information about himself, and some photos and videos. But mostly, what he wanted was a highly visual personal site which reflected his own style and tastes. All this added up to mean that I was more free than usual to really play with the graphics.
A life-long fan of the movies of De Niro and Pacino, of gothic novels such as Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde and of artists such as Rothko and Munch, Damian wanted something visually rich, layered, and dark - something more integrated, more like a painting than a conventional website. I took some of his studio shots and had a great time layering them over stock photography of abandoned buildings, dirty alleys, dark rooms, and the like to create something which both had the feel he wanted and showed him in action.
As always, I was careful to keep the content accessible. Although the flavour text on the front page (quote from Jekyll and Hyde) is an image, all the other copy on the site - Damian's bio, contact details and class information - is plain text. The menu displays images to allow use of a non-standard font, but is coded as an ordinary text-based list, and while the custom scrollbar and gallery use javascript, they degrade well, functioning perfectly, if less slickly, when javascript is disabled.
My involvement
This was a solo freelance project. The site uses the Lightbox 2 and Flexcroll scripts, but is otherwise entirely designed and built by me.
View screenshots:
