“It’s far easier to work on a web project when you already have strong branding elements to anchor the art direction.”

Couldn’t agree more. This is one thing that’s frustrating me quite a bit lately. My history is building computer game product websites for big gaming publishers (i.e. Sierra, Activision, Konami). While I enjoy the one to one freelance relationships I have now with smaller clients, it seems that more and more of them have little or no branding or identity which makes it tough, especially when I’m used to getting a CD with over 100MB of logos, screenshots, and art textures to use when building a gaming website.

“It also helped that Geof had already nailed down a wonderful new logo and color palette with Caleb Chang, just before we started.”

Couldn’t agree more. Not sure if it was the intention or not but the site has a real underground feel to it, like things are happening below the surface, which I think ties in well with the “subvert” identity. Even the illustrations, such as the rabbit, brought to mind a rabbit going down the hole below ground in Alice in Wonderland.

“Up until this project, I hadn’t done many designs using a smoky, dark background pattern.”

As soon as I saw the home page, I immediately wondered what you did with the blog. Dark backgrounds are fine for smaller amounts of content being relayed but longer articles usually don’t work out so well. Your usage of a white background for the inner content area seemed to work around this well for the other pages of the site, yet you still retain the impact of the darker background on the home page.

“More and more, I’m finding that strong copy affects the overall impact of a site as much as any design.”

Couldn’t agree more. Most home page content from clients I find way too wordy. Yet most are fine with me rewording it for them, as they see that less is more (as it helps communicate the message clearly and directly).

“Kevin did that take, but I was blown away by his trippy bunny with large ears.”

I’m starting to realize something like this as well. Often putting something completely unrelated, yet that is a metaphor for what you want to say, works far better than putting the typical subject matter instead. When I get around to relaunching my own site, I’ve got a lot of old blog posts that I want to redo with illustrations because they have a lot of metaphors contained within them as well which I think relays the ideas better.