We have two passions: food and design. And when we have the opportunity to work with a photographer that shoots delicious images, it makes our workflow even sweeter. We were recently able to work with one of our member photographers Heather Anne Thomas from Beall + Thomas, a duo based in Tennessee. Beall + Thomas primarily specializes in food & drink, home & garden, and motion.
Heather Anne came to us with a bit of a unique situation. She loved the look and feel of her current website but knew that she needed a new one that was optimized for mobile viewing. She and her assistant Zane migrated their site over to Squarespace and selected the wells template, the one that most closely matched the look of their old site. Here are a few shots of their original site:
Beall + Thomas had already made it most of the way and just needed assistance with fine-tuning in the design department to make their new site stylistically match the old one. That’s where Wonderful Machine came in.
First, we went in and set up the navigation along the left-hand side. The next step was taking the flavor of their mark and incorporating the san serif typeface and green color with a red hover and active state. We also brought that type system into the previous, next, and thumbnail options along the left-hand side as well as the About and Contact Us pages.
For the thumbnail view of their site, we chose to have a bit of padding between the images to give their beautiful photographs room to breathe:
The next aspect of the site we tackled was the motion work section. The original Beall + Thomas site would take a visitor to another website when clicking on the motion section. One of the main objectives of the new site was to consolidate the motion work with their still work. On Squarespace, you are able to embed video within the site so you don’t have to navigate to another site. So, we created a dedicated motion gallery with captions styled to reflect the type that we used for the rest of the site.
Beall + Thomas were very happy with their new site, here’s what they had to say:
We loved working with Wonderful Machine to update our website and emailer. Updating these items has been on our to do list for years, literally. I kept pushing it off thinking it would take too much time or be too expensive. Not only did Wonderful Machine do an excellent job, the budget for the project was very reasonable and because they have experts like Samantha on staff, the whole process was very quick. We’ve already received positive feedback about the new site and emailer that has generated new leads and some new assignments. Wonderful Machine has been and will continue to be an important part of our business.
Beall + Thomas’s new site is now live and is looking awesome so be sure to check it out at beallandthomas.com. For a complete before and after of Beall + Thomas’s site check out our screencast below:
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