Christopher Marques

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Diana Wolfe

Diana Wolfe is a new romance author preparing to release her debut novel. She needed a professional, engaging website to help direct potential readers and fans to her book and future works.

Overview

Diana Wolfe writes steamy MM romance featuring complex, damaged characters who deserve a happily ever after. With a fast-approaching release date for her debut novel, she required a website that captured her brand identity and served as a platform to engage her readers. The goal was to create a visually captivating and functional site that would grow with her as she continues to publish more works in the future.

Project Owner

Diana Wolfe

Role

Website Designer & Developer

Services provided

Web Design, Brand Identity

Timeline

August - October 2024

Platform

WordPress

Visit Site

Challenge

With the upcoming debut of her first romance novel, Diana Wolfe needed a visually compelling website that would capture her brand and engage readers. The challenge was to develop a professional, captivating website on a tight deadline, while also ensuring the site was flexible for future updates.

Objectives

The primary objective was to create a cohesive and engaging online platform that reflected Diana’s brand identity as a new romance author. The website needed to be ready ahead of her book release, with a design that could easily adapt as her author career evolved.

Research

During the research phase, I analyzed websites from established romance authors to identify common design patterns, audience engagement strategies, and branding elements that would resonate with Diana’s target readers. This research informed the website’s layout, typography, and visual style, ensuring it would stand out while aligning with genre expectations.

Design System

The website design uses Lora for headers, chosen for its romantic, modern look, and Merriweather for body text due to its readability and complementary style. The color palette features deep purples, violets, and black, striking a balance of sophistication and warmth. These colors were carefully chosen to reflect the emotional intensity of Diana's writing and create a sense of depth in the design.

Aa

Lora

Heading

size 50/24

Aa

Merriweather

Body

size 36/24/21/16

#1c1b29

#3f2a59

#EAEAEA

#6b3fa0

#FFFFFF

#3A2F59

#2e2c3b

#c69af0

#8a76B0

#5e4b91

Elements to be Addressed:

  • Time constraints with a tight deadline for the book launch.
  • Developing a visually rich website with limited initial content.
  • Creating a unique brand identity for a debut author in a competitive genre.

Goals:

  • Design an elegant, professional website that reflects the author’s style.
  • Complete and launch the site before the book release.
  • Create a flexible structure for future updates and new content.

Scope of Work:

  • Website Development: Built a responsive website using WordPress.
  • Brand Identity: Crafted a cohesive brand with fonts and a color palette.
  • User Experience: Ensured intuitive navigation and an engaging user interface.

Website Design

Book Cover

Client Feedback:

“I had the pleasure of working with Chris Marques on my website, and I can confidently say he goes above and beyond for his clients. He was consistently available whenever an issue arose, and his down-to-earth, calm demeanor helped alleviate any stress I experienced throughout the process.” 

- Diana Wolfe

Conclusion:

The website was completed ahead of schedule, allowing for final refinements before the official launch. Diana now has a professional online platform that reflects her author brand and provides fans with an engaging experience. The website also offers flexibility for her to easily add more content as her author career grows.

Beat Vortex

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Beat Vortex is the working title for a rhythm game I began working on in 2018. 
I picked back up work on the project during 2020 to see how much further along I could get. 

After extensive research, I was able to implement multithreading for the song loading and analysis.  
This took load times on mobile from 7-12 minutes depending on the song to 50-90 secs. 

I later use a similar technique to improve the terrain generation, which yielded similar results. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello. 

Honor Lore and art

During the pandemic, I took the opportunity to freelance and work from home as a way for me to focus on finishing up one of my passion projects.  

One of the first steps along this journey was to develop more of the lore and background of the world. 

Honor Rulebook

As progress on the game began to pick up steam, I shifted focus over to refining the rulebook I had previously thrown together during the original development. 

As part of the process, visual and grammatical improvements were made to improve the flow and clarity of the rules. 

After completing the revisions of the rulebook, the project moved forward into play tests and further refinement. 

Journal App

This past year I started working on developing a productivity app. I felt that the to-do list’s or habit trackers I had tried were very narrowly focused on doing one thing well. This often left users needing multiple apps to handle simple planning and task management for their day to day. This creates a lot of opportunities for confusion,  wasted time, and more pain points than their software solves. 

The goal of the Journal App is to give every day users the same depth and control over planning of their schedules as we have for corporations with software like Jira, Trello, Monday, or Asana. 

This project has been a great test of my UI design and implementation. It has also given me a chance to further improve my workflow for loading/storing user data. 

Tools used:  Photoshop, Trello, Unity, Visual Studio. 

Tulipanov Virtual Gallery

For this project, I was asked by the painter, Igor Tulipanov, to create a virtual gallery space where he could host private exhibitions of his art. 

I used a concept image he gave me to model the exterior off of. I then designed an interior that worked well for that space and fit his unique art style. 

The final goal for the project is to be able to embed the gallery on the homepage of their site. This proved to be the main challenge of this project was setting up the ‘multiplayer’ aspect, due to it being webgl. 

 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Photon 

Pip42 - 1 : Building design

PIP42 – 1 gives players the ability to place down structures and create bases on a foreign planet. To do this required a modular building. 

I started off by building a mood board of space structures that I felt fit the aesthetic I was looking for. 
Since the game is top down, I need to design with the ability for the  roof of all the models to be removable. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya. PureRef. 

Honor Stats Rebalancing

After the first few play tests, we found the stats for Honor needed to be rebalanced. 
Using google sheets allowed me to visualize the distributions of stats for classes, weapons, and armor. 
I was able to do this using conditional formatting, which I set to shade cell based on their value. 

The original stat calculations took a considerable amount of time to work out. 
Developing a new system cut down the time substantially. 

Tools used: Google Sheets

Honor Card Design

Over a few months, I worked to refine the card designs for my tabletop card game. Here are some iterations of the early stages. 

After not seeing much progress towards a suitable design, I decided to create a mood board to help define what I wanted to create. 

I’ve settled on a simplified look with minimal framing, allowing more room to let the art shine. 

After settling on the new design, I began implementing those concepts across the rest of the card types from the game.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Pureref

Graphics by Color Group

Before
After

This was a project for a local business. They wanted their site updated to something that was more modern and fresh than their old site. 
I designed and built out the new site remotely, then swapped the site out over night to prevent downtime and users seeing a broken site. 

www.ColorGroup.com

Museum of Bops

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Museum of Bops was a freelance animation project for the painter Igor Tulipanov.  

Igor wished to see the characters from his paintings come to life. 

I modeled the character, built out a museum and animated all the characters.

The video is the intro of the project where the characters enter the museum before climbing into the paintings to interact with their fellow bops

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello.