Pechet + Robb

Web Site

2004 - present
http://www.pechetandrobb.com

Architects and noted marshmallow enthusiasts Pechet + Robb asked for a web site that would display their extensive portfolio, print cleanly, and allow their work to come to the fore, all while maintaining a playfully quirky sense of humour through marshmallows (a metaphor for urban planning, it came out). The number one lesson from this project: not all marshmallows are created equal*.

{ Designed by Stacey Noyes and James Baker for Luzform Design }

Details

This site made extensive use of a custom-built content-management system, allowing the client to input site data and organize it all in a simple spreadsheet, which would then be translated into HTML through Director. (Since updated to glorious XML) It sounds wonky, but it works (still true), and it gives the client control over all the text (ditto), as well as the ordering of images and thumbnails, categorization of portfolio items, titles, you name it. There are other ways to do this (hence the conversion to a more standard method), which is one of the great fun things about interactive media—there’s always more than one way to do things—and I’ve tried a few of them, to see performance differences and weigh ease of use and updating. The system this site uses, in the end, is totally reliable, and fast fast fast for the user, as it requires very little pre-processing on the server end. (True enough; the XML method requires the portfolio data be parsed via PHP; what is gained in flexibility [add a project to the XML file, and the navigation is updated as well] comes with a price, but quick speed tests suggest the price [in time] is negligible.)

* As the coloured marshmallows come in four colours—green, yellow, orange, and pink—and we needed white to round out the colour-coding scheme, I of course bought a bag of white mini-marshmallows from a different brand, thinking “well, how different can they be?”. Just different enough to be noticeable, of course, so another bag was purchased, and a fine few minutes spent sorting all five colours to ensure an even distribution before tossing them all on the scanner for the image. The things they don’t teach in design school....