New website for Casa das Quintas - a rural development in the Trás-os-Montes region of Portugal, owned by friends of mine, where I had the pleasure of spending a delicious few days a while ago. It’s the perfect place to get away from the world and enjoy some peace and quiet, surrounded by beautiful landscape, in a charming yet modern and very comfortable accommodation, and this very simple website hopefully reflects all of that.

This small but fantastic team also features Marc Palmer, Seb Grant, both amazing programmers I have worked with for a long time now, and Chris Denman, who I have yet to meet personally, also a very talented developer. I’m responsible for design / illustration and occasionally some html/css coding. Our first project is finally in Beta stage and will be announced pretty soon.

It allows you to look for unusual locations where you can participate in the local community and volunteer to help with projects that can go from building a school to wild life protection actions. This content rich website was designed to accommodate an incredible amount and variety of information, and still remain simple and user-friendly.

The new packaging was decorated with a collection of illustrated animal characters. On the website, we extended the packaging design to create a land and sea world for them, and designed a series of games and activities for the kids to dowload and print based on them.

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The website was designed to contain and organise a great amount of information about the musicians and records and yet remain clean and subdued, somehow taking backstage to the beautiful imagery of the album covers.

However, in England, and specially during the Winter, having the website reflect the weather and daylight would inevitably lead to a very dark and gloomy sight. Unfortunately, the concept was dropped for something a lot less interactive, but I’ll post my mockups anyway.

While still working on a shinny new website for my friend and amazing ceramics conservator and restorer Inês Feliciano, I came up with a very simple idea for this year’s e-mail Christmas card.

After having the old and beloved template up for a couple of years, Nuno Markl asked me to redesign his blog in order to make it a bit more sober and minimalistic. It had been decided we’d lose the hand drawings and white background, and instead use a cleaner interface.

To avoid losing a graphic connection to the author, I’ve created a small Markl Universe where small icons that relate to past work and episodes orbit around the header. Hardcore fans will identify all pieces of the puzzle, most readers won’t recognise all. Over time, a few of the icons may even change, being recycled as new objects come into play.

Thanks to everyone at Blogs do Sapo for taking care of all the coding.