My new website

Yesterday I launched a website for my floral design and styling business. I've quietly been doing flowers for events on my own for the past year and have finally opened up to taking on more projects.

The website has been in the works for months and I'm beyond thrilled and proud of how its turned out. It's been the most rewarding collaborative project I've tackled yet. Macon York designed logo and text layout, Bryan Gardner shot the GORGEOUS homepage photos, Andrew Fiorillo turned the images into a clean and easy to navigate website, Erica Nikolaidis elegantly edited the copy and I conceived the concept and styled all of the photos. Dream team, forever and ever.

I've gotten an incredible response from this wonderful post about my new website, I thought it'd be fun to tell you the story of how we as a team created the site from scratch.

I started dreaming up the site's concept while I was traveling in Amsterdam last Novemeber. Micha and I went to the Rijksmuseum where I fell in love with this 1636 Jan van Kessel painting with currants and insects. As we walked home from the musuem, we stumbled upon Stenelux, a shop selling a beautiful collection of insects and butterflies. I promptly spent all of my remaining euros on a few moths and beetles with the hopes that I'd be able to recreate a similar tableaux of flowers, plants and bugs for my site.

The yellow violas are a photograph from 1910 that I thought was very sweet. I especially liked how they were shot from overhead, so it almost seems like a classic botanical illustration in picture form.

When we got home from Europe, I started hounding the internet for more images to help me flesh out my idea. I've always been a big fan of Imke Klee's gorgeous, color coordinated overhead photographs and knew I wanted to shoot my collection of plants and flowers on a white background in a similar way.

The website Sheaff Ephemera has an astounding amount of scanned antique graphics, so I pulled these two to refer back to later. I was really drawn the fonts that were on the simple, almost modern side of the antique spectrum. The illustration is a 1970s book plate that I can't get enough of.

I was really very taken with this Van Gogh painting when I saw it in The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, so much so I remember pulling out my little notebook and writing the name and something like stunning wine color with yellow and green...

The other illustrations are all from etsy, which is a treasure trove of book plates for cheap. The butterflies knocked me over, the greenhouse plants print really spoke to me because the layout and fonts were so clean and the carnivorous plants plate had a nice mix of all of the colors I wanted to use.

At this point I reached out to Macon York, who is a really talented graphic designer and art director, to develop a logo. I've followed her blog for ages and knew she was awesome at combining beautiful fonts and photographs (which she was doing for Martha Stewart at the time.) She now works for herself, doing custom design work like my website and printing letterpress cards.

Once I got her on board (very luckily, I might add!), she introduced me to her colleague at Martha, Bryan Gardner, who is a spectacular photographer. I've since learned he's a good southern boy who likes sweet tea, hosts a mean cookout in the park and has a really wonderful apartment with his whip-smart girlfriend Maggie in Greenpoint.

One sleepy Sunday we all gathered together and shot the homepage. Even while I was clipping the plants I collected and starting to style the homepage, I was thrilled with how everything looked. Bryan is really out of this world talented and he put on Paul Simon's Graceland while shooting. I kept everyone caffeinated and full of cookies.

When we had the images done, Macon got to work designing the site's layout. We did multiple options and while the floral wreath was my favorite photo- we all agreed the airy rectangle lent itself best to a website. The wreath is going to become a thank you card, so I'll get to look at it a lot, too.

Once Macon had the text layout settled, we turned all of the files to Andrew, who built the back-end of the site. Not only did he work crazy quickly, he also handled my pathetic attempts to talk about HTML related issues like a champ. There was a night when we were supposed to be chatting about site stuff and instead he tolerated my ramblings for at least 30 minutes about how romantic Anthony Hopkins is as a butler in Remains of the Day. He is very kind, to say the least.

 

My dear friend Frankie took this snap of me when we were in New Hampshire last week and I couldn't help but use it as a bio photo on the site. It makes writing a blurb about yourself much more bearable when you have a photo that doesn't make you want to hide. All of the words on the site got a once over from Erica, who is the editor for my posts on design*sponge. She has a witty and smart voice, so she's very easy to trust when it comes to polishing sentences. And she doesn't judge when I confuse its vs it's, which is all the time.

I'm really thrilled with how the site turned out and I couldn't be more honored to work with the people who brought it all together. Long story but a short message, stop by and let me know what you think!