Menu Close Menu

Cole Brown

Web Design + Development

Cole Brown spent the last couple of years writing about his experiences growing up Black in White neighborhoods in Philadelphia. With his new book Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World nearing its release date and lots of attention Cole would be getting because of the subject matter of his book and current events in America with racism and systematic injustices, a long term client of mine (Cole's aunt!) reached out on his behalf to create an expert personal site to showcase himself and his new book. I quickly got to work designing and developing his new expert website.

Project Details

Hip, modern, but still cool and professional

During the initial discussions about Cole's website, it was clear that he wanted a website that was unique, hip, and modern, but still professional enough to showcase his work while he promoted his new book Greyboy.

Initially, we opted for a gold and grayscale color scheme to give the site the bold pop of color and energetic feel while still complimenting his book cover design. When the final design was tweaked and approved for what you see here, we opted to change the color scheme to a more subdued but modern color scheme, one that also works very well with his book cover.

The design features slanted sections to bring a hip and energetic feel to the site and tilts away (pun-intended) from most trendy design styles of websites today. To take the design one step further, I overlapped some of the elements to give the site a bit of dimension and help with page flow throughout the site.

In the end, the site design sticks with the overall goals of the site: unique and hip, while staying cool and professional.

Staying away from cookie cutter templated web design

When we initially started working on Cole's website, one thing he shared with me was that he wanted each page to have a different, unique design, instead of the often corporate feeling websites where every single page feels like it is using the same layout.

With that in mind I designed and developed the different pages on Cole's website to be different and unique on their own, while still matching his new design aesthetic of calm blue colors and slanted sections. One of the design layouts on the site includes having full-width images with text on top. A couple of pages on his website feature this similar design layout.

Cole's book Greyboy is certainly not the last project he'll work on (as smart as he is, I'm confident there will be much more from Cole in the future!). With any project he works on in the future, his website was designed to work for him and cater to everything he has in store.

You can order Cole's book Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World here.