Ghana Goods home pageSingle drum product with size selection in shop
Ghana Goods imports and sells West African drums, musical instruments, textiles and gifts. Owner Ben Lawrence, is also a dedicated drumming teacher with years of experience and knowledge about drumming techniques and Ghanaian culture.
The site’s primary function is as a shop for selling professional quality African instruments. We used WooCommerce for the shop, which is easy to manage but can also be adapted easily to most shop needs.
The site also advertises workshops and courses with the ability for visitors to book and pay for them.
The site also has a huge amount of information about Ghanaian music and culture, plus a large section of learning support articles to help his learners. Organising the information and making it easy for visitors to navigate and find the information they want took a lot of time and planning, but it was an interesting challenge to devise a method to display the information in a clear and easy to understand way.
The design of the site is based on colours, patterns and textures of the drums, instruments and textiles. Although we wanted the site to function in a modern way, we used some old school effects such as drop shadows and textures to echo the visual richness of Ghana.
Ruddy’s Cleaning Home pageRuddy’s Cleaning Home page – mobile view
Ruddy’s Cleaning Company needed a website to launch their new business. After discussion, it was clear that the business had 2 distinct sets of customers: domestic cleaning and commercial cleaning. So we created a home page which directed customers towards the service they required, with a separate landing page for each customer base.
After an initial meeting the owner of Ruddy’s quickly grasped how to write SEO-friendly and engaging content for the website, and the small family run company was able to take some excellent photos of their happy staff using their i-Phones.
Having such quality content made it very easy to produce this website, which is very focussed on providing all the information a customer needed to make a decision whether to choose their service.
Using their own photos helped to create the sense that the company was personable and friendly, rather than opting to use generic image library photos, which most of their competitors use.
The choice of pastel blues, with bold black title fonts on a clean white background created a sense of cleanliness, which contrasted nicely with the jazzy and fun logo in bright yellow and black.
The commercial cleaning landing page includes a detailed quote form, to cut down the amount of time it would normally take to discuss work over the phone, and the domestic cleaning Pricelist page has an online booking and payment form hosted by the 3rd party bookings provider Launch27.
The home page and landing pages have a carousel of live Google Reviews to help prospective customers make decision, which is a hugely useful feature for an industry based on trust. All the pages display the Bark badge, to reassure customers.
It was a pleasure to work with such a focussed company, and it felt good to help them get started and watch them become a busy and established company.
Ujima Radio home pageUjima Radio home page – mobile view
Ujima Radio CIC is a vital part of Bristol’s community and music scene, promoting black artists and culture with talk radio and DJ shows.
This is the 3rd website design for Ujima Radio by Disphoria Design, to keep the site up to date and useful for visitors.
The current design was built with the intention of increasing visitor engagement, allowing presenters to edit their own show pages and post news features related to their shows.
The design was intended to say “Radio” from the home page onwards, so we tried to escape from the standard generic website format, using a sidebar navigation menu, with vertical sideways headings for each page and section.
The colours match the branding of the logo and brand documents, using bold non-serif fonts and clean modern typography. The images used are very bright and eye-catching, so the design needed to be restrained in its use of colour to allow the busy visual imagery of the fliers and show photos to be seen clearly, without competing with the design.
The radio player in the sidebar shows the current show image and title, which link to the show page. The Play button was changed to an Unmute button, with an animated EQ bar to give visitors the impression that they were listening in to the current broadcast, rather than playing an MP3.
Each show has a Show page, with an audio player to listen to recordings of their most recent shows, an automated feature which is essential for the audience. Presenters can also post news posts which appear at the bottom of their show page. The show pages also feature an info box, with links to the presenters’ social media accounts, website and lists their next broadcast.
The Show pages allow presenters to embed video or music players easily so the site can grow into a rich content media website.
The shows shown in the schedule link to each show page, which is another very useful feature, to help visitors find the information they seek.
The site is constantly evolving as the radio station grows, so new features and sections are being added as they are needed.
The intention was for presenters to find it easy to edit their pages, so the site was designed with this in mind, making it easy for presenters to edit their show pages without the risk of damaging anything. Presenters have clearly defined permissions that only allow them to edit their own pages and posts related to their shows.
The schedule is designed to be easily edited by station staff, which is essential for a busy radio station with a constant flow of new shows.
Rice and Things home pageRice and Things home page – mobile view
Rice and Things Jamaican Restaurant has been redesigned by Disphoria Design several times to keep it up to date.
The current design uses interesting title fonts to hint at the Jamaican origin of the food, with warm reds and oranges rather than the traditional Jamaican red, gold and green, which is so ubiquitous in Bristol that it could be seen as a cliché. The website title fonts emulate the sign on the restaurant.
Chef wanted the site to showcase the restaurant’s commitment to the community, so there are some prominent news posts about his work with young offenders, the police showing solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and the restaurant’s work with local elders. The visit by Jamie Oliver brought in a lot of new customers, so this is highlighted on the home page.
Thinking of how visitors would use the site, the design made it easy to find the Takeaway menu, find the map and parking information, and ordering instructions on the home page.
The home page also has a carousel of live Google Reviews, since visitors want reassurance when choosing a restaurant, and Google Reviews are more credible than a list of testimonials. The restaurant gets so many glowing 5 star Google Reviews that it seemed essential to show them. The carousel gets automatically updated regularly.
The catering page has a very detailed quote request form, to save the staff time, since they won’t have to ask the same questions for each enquiry.
The Harbourside Practice homepageBristol Talking Therapy Rooms homepage
The Harbourside Practice and Bristol Talking Therapy Rooms are sibling websites for the upper and lower floors of the same building, which offers talking therapy room hire for therapists.
The sites’ main purpose is to showcase the therapy rooms in an attractive way, and it also showcases the therapists who work there, functioning as a directory that visitors can use to find a therapist that suits them.
The therapist directory was designed to be easy for clients to browse to find the right therapist, with a sidebar listing the different categories of therapy, and a search box to filter the therapists based on their therapy styles.
The therapy rooms are situated in a beautiful Georgian house in the Redcliffe area of Bristol Harbourside. The building has traditional features, but has been decorated to a high modern standard.
The website theme was designed to be clean and modern, yet referenced the historical aspects of the building in the choice of serif fonts for headings and calming neutral greys and warm creams in the background colours.
Bristol Talking Therapy Rooms logo
The Bristol Talking Therapy Rooms logo was designed to show the Georgian doorway of the therapy rooms building. The serif fonts emulate the Georgian style of the building.
The Harbourside Practice website has an introductory video and and both sites use photography by Curioso Media
Pali Text Society home pagePali Text Society home page – mobile view
The Pali Text Society is a non-profit educational charity, publishing Buddhist texts in the original Pali language, alongside translations, guides to the Pali language and commentaries on the original texts.
The website sells nearly 500 publications worldwide, so it was very important that the shop functioned reliably, including comprehensive shipping rules and covering EU VAT for shipping to European countries.
Some of the books are sold as sets, or as individual books within sets, with the option for hardback and paperback copies, so the shop needed to be arranged so these options were clearly shown to customers.
The shop was built using WooCommerce with a dedicated Shipping Rules plugin, using PayPal as the payment gateway.
It was important that the admin staff could fulfil the orders easily, so in the backend there are methods of exporting the orders as CSV files that can be sent to the shipping fulfilment company.
There are two tiers of membership with a percentage discount for each, so the cart needed to automatically add the discount when using a membership code.
The site also includes a donation form, with the option to make recurring donations.
The design is modern and responsive, so it works on all devices, but it incorporates fonts that can display the Pali characters, which hint at the ancient source while looking modern and easy to read.
We worked closely to develop a theme that reflected the ancient sources of the texts, which were scratched onto palm leaves dusted with charcoal. I used a subtle papyrus texture in the header and footer, with a soft cream coloured background and earthy tones for the headings.
Pali Text Society logoPali Text Society logo icon
I designed the logos to use the ancient Tripitaka symbol, but rendered in a modern simple style so the logos would still be visible clearly on mobile phones.
PC Press is a small independent book publisher specialising in books about neo-folk and industrial music.
Home page – mobile view
The website functions firstly as a shop, but also as a source of information about the artists and writers.
Woocommerce was used for the shop, which has a shopping cart, discount codes, complex shipping rules and related products displayed underneath each product.
I designed the first iteration of the PC-Press website to emulate photocopied fanzines of the post-punk era, with distressed typewriter fonts and a rusty metallic background image as a reference to industrial music.
But the publishing company has expanded to cover wider forms of music, so the design was starting to feel like a constraint on the new material. We tried out a lot of design ideas, before agreeing on a brand new look, based on The Face and ID magazines from the 1980s.
The Face was ground-breaking at the time. The lead designer Neville Brody broke the rules of publishing with his use of extremely bold fonts, using them as design elements. He would use illegible fonts, fonts leaking across images and unreadable vibrant colour combinations. We felt that his iconoclastic punk approach to design would suit the new range of books that PC Press are currently producing.
Examples of The Face and ID magazine design from the 80sThe previous design of PC Press
So the new PC Press website landing pages use clashing colours, ultra bold or illegible fonts and very bold images, whilst retaining the essential functionality of the shop and clear navigation. The site is designed to make an equal visual impression on mobiles, since most visitors are accessing the website by mobile now.
Landing page
Landing page
Shop page
PC Press logo design
The stark and simple logo design references the Bauhaus and Russian Constructionist art movements, which is very relevant to the bands that PC Press has written about.
During COVID lockdown, St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, Corsham and Our Lady of the Assumption, Chippenham merged to combine resources.
I had designed the St Patrick’s church and they needed a new website to serve the combined parishes.
During Lockdown, when parishioners were not able to meet in person, the website became more essential as a means to communicate and feel part of a community, so the site had live-streamed services from Clifton Catholic Cathedral, and the parish diary events section became an essential resource.
The new website was designed to look modern, yet also warm and welcoming, using warm cream and green colours. To reflect the wide demographic of modern Catholic parishioners, which included a large amount of Polish and Nigerian parishioners, it was important to avoid making the branding look too Irish, which was the main demographic in the past.
I created 2 new logos for the 2 churches, combining traditional elements with a clean, simplified modern styling, which could be easily viewed at a small scale on mobile screens.
The new website needed to display a large amount of essential information in a clear and easy to navigate format, that wouldn’t appear overwhelming to visitors, so a lot of planning went into how visitors could access the information they needed.
The events section shows upcoming events in calendar format and also as lists, both with event details shown on rollover.
The most recent PDF of the Weekly Bulletin is shown automatically on the home page as a downloadable link.
The home page also displays the most recent news posts in a carousel.
