Project: Doof! Media | Antidefault

Design

Now, this one was fun. It's a website for a podcast with several shows, mostly focusing on discussing interesting things in media. I had full creative freedom for this beyond the direction of "Art Deco." The first few iterations were horrible - I knew I wanted to go fancy and put a frame around the website, but any SVG frame designs I made ended up looking.. cheap doesn't even describe it.

I ended up giving up on those efforts and decided to render the frame in Blender by modelling an actual billboard with lightbulbs and spotlight and all, and then doing a physically accurate render with Cycles. The secret sauce here was rendering using an orthographic camera.

This is an earlier version:

I later then scaled the parts up by quite a bit and rendered them separately, so they can actually be integrated into the website:

The microphone graphic is a simple Blender model as well:

Beyond that, everything else is just SVG graphics. There's grain filters above most sections of the website to give the whole thing a papery look like one would expect on a billboard.

Wordpress

I had to migrate the website from the previous Wordpress instance to the new CMS that's connected to all this, Directus CMS. Untangling that database wasn't fun with pure SQL, and I'm not going into that mess. Next time around I'd probably just run a web scraper against the instance, instead of trying to get the data directly from a database dump.