Eve Copper’s coming out

Eve Copper

Eve is a fantastically talented fashion designer and dressmaker who lives just down the road, well … canal – from my office. I have seen her photography and shots of people modelling her clothes and so I was aware of the quality I’d be working with, so when she asked for a website it was a no-brainer.

Like many of the briefs I receive, this one was very loose and I really hope that my reputation and word of mouth continue to spread in such a way that this is encouraged more and more. All I asked for was 10 or so images, I then set about making a website that would be functionally faultless and as unobtrusive as possible.

You shouldn’t be visiting a website like this and marvelling at my work, you should be marvelling at Eve’s work – my website should simply ‘function’ and allow the visitor to use it without thinking and get to where they want to go and see what they want to see.

As with all my sites now, the website is built on WordPress. I’ve wanted to build a single page ‘Parallax’ site for some time and this was the ideal opportunity, so I chose a theme by ‘907’ and it has worked out really well. There are several options on how to present the landing page but as I had access to such great hi-res images, I have stuck with that. I originally chose a French Blue to accent the design, picking it out from the tartan Eve had used in some of her designs – but in order to work with later collections we decided to go with a collection of neutral greys. A grey pallet is always good to set off great images and push the website in to the background, but an accent colour is still useful for functionality, to point out links and headings etc. A deep matt red was chosen by Eve for headings and we then decided to use this as a background to the studio shots, in order to differentiate them from the Editorial, reversing the font to white – this worked well.

I originally used an off the shelf standard seriffed font for Eve’s logo – which is just her name – as I had seen this used on her labels. It served us through the design process but I knew I wanted to tweak it before going live. I was already lining up Andrew Lathwell in my mind and he came up with the goods once again. The great thing about having long term partners is that you get to know how each other works, but as we are both sole traders we do not need to ‘adjust’ to each other like teams do. I told Andrew that I wanted it to remain classic, but with a tiny tweak of ‘unique’ or ‘quirky’. He sent over some options and Eve and I both immediately agreed on the ‘Usherwood’ font. I then decided to embed this font on the site so I could also use it for the quotes on the Parallax sections.

We are both really happy with the final result and Eve has already had a fantastic response to her Autumn/Winter 15 collection, even getting requests from a high street boutique for stock within 24 hours! That for me is the greatest reward this job can offer, being part of  someone’s first success. Watch this space for new collections and exciting updates in the future.

Eve’s kind review:

Finding someone to give my Fashion Design Website an elegant, yet unobtrusive edge was looking a little tricky in Devon, until I stumbled upon Max.
I’m a complete Techno-tard with no idea how or what I wanted from my website, and was under a time constraint to get something together for the launch of my new collection. Luckily my lack of Industry terms (referring to icons as squiggly thingies) did not phase Max, who took time to understand what I was looking for, and focus my ideas in to a practical vision. He also used his considerable expertise in the area to create something that would work on touch screens (extremely important in retail) and something I had not even considered.

This vision was developed really quickly, with a significant amount of hand holding, and free insight to web marketing from launch. Artistically speaking I think I only contributed the accent colour, the rest was perfect from inception.

I have nothing but praise for every aspect of the Pig Farmers work. The final outcome exceeds all my expectations.The website is stylish, offering an elegant backdrop which makes my designs look incredible. It’s intuitive, easy to navigate, and super modern. I’ve had so much positive feedback for the site, and to say that it has transformed my business would be putting it lightly.