LookatLao Studio : Web Design & Lively Banter

STP: Century and Then Some

I finally cracked the 100 mile mark on the bike last weekend as me and Team PBDH took to the roads for the summer classic known as STP (Seattle to Portland). It’s 200 miles in two days and it’s both a challenging double century and a rolling bike party with 9000 participants all at the same time. We actually went well beyond the century mark our first day and added 36 more miles before rolling into the Castle Rock high school in southern Washington late Saturday afternoon. 136 miles in a single day!

I’ll finish this story over at a new blog fellow teammate Dave Cole and I are starting called Velotopia. It’s a website for people who ride bikes and we think it’s going to be pretty neat. We haven’t officially launched it yet so consider this a sneak peek for LookatLao readers.

See plenty of STP photos in the Velotopia Gallery too!

New Double-Tall Site From LookatLao

This is the last one for a while as summer is near and I’m hoping spend more time on the bike and behind the lens. Here’s the lowdown: my pals down at 611 Supreme finally cashed-in on my offer to build them a website at discounted rates plus cocktails. Here is the result. The lounge at 611 is sort of my back-up living room as I spend quite a bit of time there slurping caipirinhas and engaging in the requisite Friday happy hour banter. It’s hands-down my favorite bar next to Ong’s in Ayutthaya.

I had fun this time shooting the photography, but I realize now that I must acquire a low-light camera if I am going to keep doing restaurant photography. (A Nikon D300 is on my list.) I also got to use a couple of photos from Brooke Fits who is a local photographer and acquaintance. Her photos are pretty great and I hope to work with her more in the future.

Check out 611supreme.com

New Double-Wide Site From LookatLao

My pals over at Tavolata contacted me a while back and said they wanted a website for a new restaurant they were opening called How To Cook A Wolf. The name comes from a book by M.F.K. Fisher and it’s supposedly a masterpiece of culinary adventure. (I haven’t read it, though we used a few quotes in the site and I get where she’s coming from.)

Before the site design, while the restaurant was still being built, we did a horrific photo shoot involving a pig carcass and a miter saw which we hoped to use as a coming soon page. Sadly, that page never materialized, but I’m saving those photos for something, just not sure what.

When I first saw the finished space I had a petty good idea of where the design inspiration was going to come from: the textures. The restaurant build is impressive: slate, pounded copper, bent wood and it all came together in a single-page, extra-wide design where textures blend together to form the different sections.

Anyway, enough banter, take a look at howtocookawolf.com and tell me what you think.

New PBDH Website

We launched a brand new site over at the day job and I have to say I’m pretty excited about it. It was a long, drawn out process—as internal processes often are—but in the end it worked. Probably because in the eleventh hour we scrapped two years of careful planning and just went with our gut and redesigned the whole thing. Three weeks and a couple of long nights and weekends later the new pbdh.com site went live. While we did redesign at the last minute, the core functionality of the backend (Expression Engine) was the effort of a lot of planning, and it did remain intact. That and an employee photo shoot that I art directed and shot myself involving some three thousand photos.

I don’t talk about the day job around here too much, but I have to say our little firm is doing really well. We’ve just rebranded and our approach to design has matured quite a bit since I started five years ago. I’m liking where we are heading quite a bit. And hopefully it shows in the new site. Check it out when you have some time and don’t miss Devin’s inaugural blog post, it really nails where PBDH is headed. And, bookmark the PBDH blog, as I and a few others plan on spending a fair amount of time writing there.

Some Beards I Tried Once

After the holiday break last December I had some free time off work and decided to ditch the razor and cultivate a fine beard. The response was mostly positive and I have to say it was kind of fun. I might even turn it into an ongoing winter tradition. And of course, shaving the thing off presented a photo-op I just couldn’t pass up.

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