How we built the new Lua website 

Planning and design

All projects begin with conceptual research. Influenced by our roots in print design, several drafts were produced before the ‘half-tone’ moon logo was created.

The design was developed with Photoshop. The first version of the revamp used vector shapes before opting for this current design. The inspiration for the rocket launch came from the artists ‘Kahn and Schlesnick’ – see their ‘Apollo Prophecies‘ project. The images of the rocket, toy soldiers and the smoke were sourced from istockphoto.com.

Originally the colours were garish but then desaturated to create a ’50s’ look, complimenting the mix of retro styling.

The development

To suit our needs WordPress was chosen as the framework and made the build a straightforward exercise.

Plugins have been kept to a minimum – a full list can be found in the colophon section. We were undecided whether to use font replacement, finally opting for FLIR – allowing the use of Optima for H1 and H2 headings. FLIR doesn’t need Flash and is easier to implement than sIFR . There was some difficulty with special characters but overall it was easy to install.

The little animation pointing to the homepage and the cosmonaut guiding the user to the top of the screen uses the jQuery library – light to load and easy to implement. The pointing hand is from the font set ‘Victorian’. The cosmonaut was found on Flickr and is used with the courtesy of Olyachka.