I just finished a new poster design for Terracotta half-life. The poster lists gig dates for the first half of 2010 as well as the band’s website. I based this design on some ancient Egyptian art. It has a gritty feel due to the use of subtle textures and shades of dark gray. This darkness of the bottom half is contrasted with multiple layers of warm colors and patterns on the top half.

There are two fonts used. One is a mono-spaced serif that looks like it could be from an old printing press, and the other is very futuristic. I used these to impart a sense of timelessness. By using the same warm colors from the Egyptian art on the text, the bottom half is tied in with the top. I also used green and white, two colors that were taken directly from the color scheme at terracottahalflife.com in order to create some continuity of branding.

Terracotta half-life is a musical group based out of Marquette, Michigan that I started about five years ago. Performing with the group are some of the areas finest musicians. Over the years I’ve designed Logos, T-shirts, Stickers, and many Posters for the band.

Terracotta half-life is a tropical funk band from Marquette Michigan that I founded over five years ago. I created the first website for the band in 2005. It was a static site built with HTML and formatted the “old” way with lots of nested tables and inline styles. It was a real pain to update. Over the years, its been evolving with the band and now looks like this.

The site has gone through several revisions since 2005. It was given a proper style sheet, the layout was changed several times, and of course the actual content was modified (many times).

In 2008, the site went through a major overhaul with a transition to a WordPress based site. Built with PHP and using a MySQL database, it was now a dynamic site with blogging functionality and an RSS feed. However, I used a generic WordPress Theme (slightly modified) for this version of the site and was never completely satisfied.

Now, its been completely redesigned again. This time with a new WordPress Theme that I custom designed. Although the site has been completely redesigned, my goal was to maintain a similar feel. So the logo, background image, and color scheme have essentially remained the same.

The site is now more user friendly with a horizontal navigation bar just under the logo as well as at the bottom of every page. This should make it much easier to navigate the site.

Also, the blog has been moved to the main page instead of being separated into different categories and buried in the site somewhere. This should make it more interesting to visitors immediately upon arrival.

You can now subscribe to the blog via email as well as RSS feed.

The Photo gallery is now broken into separate years to make photo browsing easier.

Of course there were a lot of other small changes made that I won’t go into, but let me just say that I am much more satisfied with the site now.

terracottahalflife.com