Etre Bon Gallery and Academy invited us to pitch a design for their web design and e-commerce project. Etre Bon is a sub-brand of Bon Café, which aims to teach and expose Singaporeans and residents to appreciate the art of coffee-making by conducting Coffee Journey Tours and Barista Workshops. As an exclusive agent in Singapore for selling Ascaso Dream Espresso Machines, the website is also targeted for online selling/ordering of this machine as well as barista tools.

etre bon illustrations

In approaching the design for this project, I focused on this particular statement from their brochure. “JOURNEY FROM CROP TO CUP. It may appear to be simple, but behind every cup of coffee lies a stirring story.” The solution doesn’t involve any rocket science or philosophical art. The solution is simple: I just created a simple illustration of the “story of coffee”, focusing on the idea, from “crop” to “cup” and the processes involved in-between.

etrebon homepage

etrebon shop

I used some of the elements from their branding such as the striped gray line on top of the rich, black background and added some small, hand illustrated icons on the section pages.

I created some burst of colour for the e-commerce page and enjoyed designing the rest of the styling for all the pages.

The programming team, especially Elliot and Ross, our flash guy extraordinaire, have done a great job in the execution of this project. I want to thank Xiong Zhou and Ian, for bringing us this gem of a client for us to work on.

Cheers to us! Or would I rather say, a cup of coffee for all of us!

This year,  Orchard Central wanted to update the look of their site and decided to use my second design. The client requested for some design enhancements and what we have created is a simpler and sleeker design set against a very dark gray colour with the photo of the mall in the background.

If you ever passed along Orchard Road during night time, Orchard Central’s psychedelic lights illuminate the skyline. This new web design echoes the dynamism and playful interplay of their colour and lights. The rollover effect at the main navigation and the orange and pink small squares on the homepage and inner pages is a direct interpretation of the mall’s night lights.

The site is fully equipped with CMS (Content Management System) which allows the client full access to the database system.

Below is the new design for Orchard Central website:

Orchard Central’s old web design:

From my point of view as a designer, I can say that SA Tours has been one of my favourite clients from my last year’s web design portfolio. SA Tours, or Sino-America Tours Corporation Pte Ltd (Singapore) belongs to one of the top travel agencies here in Singapore. Forecepts was commissioned to design and develop their new website and create some of their direct-marketing e-mail campaigns.

Design Inspiration:

I’m fascinated about http://www.lonelyplanet.com/ website structure, the richness of its content, the clean lines and the orderly fashion by which datas are presented in their site. So I’ll unabashedly admit that my design for SA Tours have been greatly influenced by this website.

Creating all the buttons and little icons have been a real treat for me.

Last July 22^nd, just one month after being featured in CSS Mania, I was really surprised when A Crayon’s Life was featured in Smashing Magazine, under the title: “50 New Beautiful Blog Designs”. I know that my website is still a work in progress and there are still a lot that needs to be done to improve my website, but nevertheless, I’m really honoured to be mentioned in one of the famous online magazine for web professionals.

Thanks to Smashing Magazine, Crayosa has found her entryway into the vast abyss of the cyberworld.

My google analytics reported visits from 52 countries with top visits from my homeland, The Philippines, followed by The United States, Singapore, United Kingdom and South Korea, respectively.

Two interesting country names appeared on the list and had me searching for them in Wikipedia. Forgive me about my inadequate knowledge of the world map and geography but I’m really not familiar with these two countries: Moldova and Serbia.

I found out that these two countries hold a very rich history in Europe. According to Wikipedia:

Serbia is a country located in both Central and Southeastern Europe, with its history dating back to the reign of Alexander the Great. Moldova, on the other hand,  is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, located between Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south. In antiquity, the territory of the present day country was part of Dacia, then fell under the influence of the Roman Empire.

Talking about Crayosa jetsetting into cyberworld.  :)

According to URL fan (http://www.urlfan.com), Crayonslife Ranks #146388out of 3,783,534 websites (as of Sept. 10, 2009) . It is mentioned in 16 unique feeds, 30 posts and Bloggers mention this site on average every 4 days.

My heartfelt gratitude goes out to Smashing Magazine and all these websites who are generous enough to share a small space in their cyberuniverse to let Crayosa drift into their galleries and blogs:

Once again, I would like to thank my friend, Apple Ilagan and her husband, Gerry for helping me with this site.