John Mani - Web Designer, Extraordinaire

Home is where the art is. Little City is our Toronto-based online visual arts community blog and store.

Design is the watchword here. Little City required a visually compelling style that was true to its creative community spirit, while simultaneously serving to showcase the site’s featured artwork.

Local artist and great friend to Little City, Sona Safei, generously provided the illustration work seen in the page headers. On the backend, I created a custom ecommerce CMS for the Little City store that automatically populates the store page and the rotating work featured on the home page.

Born in Winnipeg, raised in Bramps, she’s Toronto’s globetrotting photo-phenom du jour.

Toronto photographer, Alyssa Bistonath had a long-time love/hate affair with her blogger.com blog. She came to me with two requirements for a new site: A blog structured to show off her writing and photographical adventures, and a portfolio gallery to dazzle potential clients with her best work.

We decided on a page width that would complement her photos, while maintaining readability. An easy to update gallery was implemented through the galleria plugin, and customized to fit her page.

If I may, one of my favourite bits of photoshop wizardry to date was in creating the painted purple sidebar that seamlessly repeats down the page. As I like to say, it’s the little things that count.

Emily Thomas dishes up the latest on Canadian politics and pop culture just the way you like it - evenly roasted and smothered in its own drippings.

Emily Thomas, my lovely fianceé gave me carte blanche in designing a little blog for her occasional political/pop-cultural writings and published work. She wanted something hip, yet dignified; current, yet germane to printed text; colourful, yet black and white. Then it came to me — zebras.

“[I]f any two persons could pull off the zebra, it would be you. Delicately acerbic writing. An astutely realized grey/purple/yellow. And yet, to drift downwards, lulled by dry wit and the staccato of sentences, only to be confronted by the inimitable gaze of the committed, purple herd... well, that was transcendent”
- Jared Penner

A singularly talented and all-around stand-up guy, Matthew de Zoete is helping pop-rock recover its lost sense of dignity and self-worth.

Matthew’s old website was made in flash and a pain to update. As a musician, there was a lot of media to juggle: press releases, photos, and of course music. The goal was to make content management much simpler and give the site a fresh style that complemented Matthew’s particular brand of Canadian pop-rock. His fans seem to really like the new look - the additional social networking and iTunes links probably help.

Months later, Matthew asked me to add an online newsletter sign-up (that he had previously been adding from hand-scribbled sheets of paper). I was happy to oblige.