Nick Maland

Playful personal site and shop of award winning children's book illustrator

Nick Maland is an award winning children’s book illustrator. He came to me with a very different brief to normal, instead of wanting something easy to use, responsive and professional he wanted fun, different and quirky. He did not want our ideas to be bogged down by having to work for different screen sizes and the same boring menu structure on every page. He wanted a showcase of his work for publishers to see.

The above image is the homepage. The image is normally in just black and white and you have to discover each area by hovering with the mouse to see each section show in colour and animate. There are lots of layers of images that are all preloaded. I turned some of his artwork into gifs to make it feel more interactive. He didnt want it to be obvious what to do and for people to discover it. Obviously mouse hover doesnt work on touch screens so I set different timers on each animation so they would flash up and prompt the user.

So because every element of the site is hand drawn and often animated (as shown on the contact page above – the eyes follow the mouse and the wallpaper is only colour when the mouse hovers on a picture frame) its taken a very long time to progress (hes also extremely busy so this has become bottom of the priority list). Because of this we set a temporary under construction image for the pages not yet ready with a diversion back to the home page or for the books page the diversion is to his books listed on amazon.