Jon Gredmark

The website jongredmark.com was made as a portfolio for graffiti artist and painter Jon Gredmark. His only wish for the site was for it to be black and white and for the design to not distract from the pictures of the work he wants to showcase.

Colors

The color scheme uses grays with a slightly warm tint, and a saturated yellow as accent color for hovering, focus states and selections. The yellow was chosen specifically for its urban feel, reminiscent of cranes and safety rails, as well as the iconic New York taxis, from the city near to Jon's heart.

Fonts

Three fonts were used for this project: one for headings, one for body text, and one for all the rest.

The font used for headings is Abril Fatface - a thick display font with thin serifs. It was chosen due to how closely it resembles other typefaces commonly used for newspaper headings. Before working as an artist full time, Jon has had a long career as a mail carrier, and there was an opportunity for the design of the site to reflect that by resembling a newspaper.

For body text the font used was Playfair - an elegant sans serif font and a fairly popular general purpose font. It was chosen for this purpose as it worked well with the newspaper theme and was easy to read even at small sizes.

The universal font is Cutive Mono - a monospace font based on typewriter typefaces, though optimized for screens. Chosen for similar reasons as the previous font, the typewriter feel makes the text more personalized and grounded in the tactile world.

Flair

To add a little bit of flair to the site the navbar is not a solid white, but rather slightly transparent. Anything that passes underneat the navbar when scrolling turns black and white and a bit blurred, like when ink diffuses in water. In order for the text of the buttons to always be legible no matter what images come underneath, the brightness is turned up so that even the darkest of pictures pale just enough for the contrast between text and background to be sufficient.