Blending passion with work is always a delight.
I had the opportunity to collaborate with Luke Chmilenko, a renowned author in the LitRPG genre, to rebuild his web presence, and give him a new face to carry him forward as he continues to generate popularity with his writings. He needed a visual presence that reflected his space and increasing notoriety, as well as a website platform and structure to help him scale this as time continued forward.
Project Intention
Define and impress
With Luke’s growing audience, it was important for his presence to evolve into a new stance that was structured, strategic, and ready for growth. Alongside of this, it needed to be prepared to create impact on his readership with announcements, character illustrations, and engaging visuals to keep visitors excited.
Skills & Tools
- UI
- Figma
- Photoshop
- WordPress
- HTML/CSS/PHP
Genre-Focused
It was critical that the style spoke to his readership. Textures, illustrative graphics, “game UI” vibes, and smooth transitions championed this, grounding his new presence and making the user feel right at home.
Flexible for Growth
WordPress was a no-brainer – I custom built a WordPress theme from the ground up, with a focus on total editability and flexibility for changes and evolution, ensuring new book pages required zero code, but allowed for maximum impact.
Professional Presence
With Luke continuing to gain traction and popularity, it was important to make sure that he was presented professionally in space that is incredibly competitive. Unique page layouts, appropriate text sizing/scaling, and proper usage of textures and fine details were a requirement.
Building a familiar environment
Creating an interface-style aesthetic that kept things very much in the LitRPG universe was a requirement. Thin borders, light shadows, subtle textures and gradients, and slight transparency helped to bring this vision to a forefront – all while ensuring usability was a primary focus.
Engaging with textures and depth
Flat only goes so far as an impactful trend. This particular aesthetic required some play on depth with the help of subtle shadows and glows, as well as overlapping graphics that broke free of their containers for further excitement. In combination with smooth transition movements on load and hover, a vibrant experience was created with relatively minimal heavy customization.
See it live on lukechmilenko.com