An award-winning international surfing, surf art, photography and culture website

Project

Club of the Waves is a personal project — very much a labour of love, that I founded in 2006. It showcases surf artists & photographers, including interviews, exhibits, tutorials, debates, blogs, forums and articles on the history and culture of surfing. This was the first re-design of the website since it launched. A total re-brand, design and build. The identity subtly changes over the main sections with definitive section colours. The navigation was the main focus, so new and old features can be found easily and quickly. There are several templates covering 500+ web pages, shown here are just some of the main templates and variations. Read some fan/industry testimonials here, and an article I wrote on the benefit of personal projects, relating to this project.

"COTW is a wicked surf culture and art site packed with surfing lore. I've lost countless hours of valuable surf time perusing its intimidating amount of content. Head on over and don't make any plans, it's addictive."

Ed Fladung

Link

http://archive.clubofthewaves.com

Involvement

Founder
Creative director
Design
Front & back-end build
Copywriting

Client

Club of the Waves

Date

Sept 2010

Honours

Shortlisted at the 2011 Lovie Awards and the British BIMA Awards. Named as one of the best HTML5 websites of 2011 by Creative Bloq magazine. People's Champ at the 2010 Pixel Awards.

Home page

A portal and introduction to the whole site. For wow factor and to immediately sell the amazing surf art & photography featured on the site, a large, impact feature gallery showcases new and popular features. Below that are blog posts, the latest tweet and popular features. And finally room for advertising, social plugins, an introduction to the website (aid to SEO) and more social links.

Navigation

There are numerous forms (and mixes) of navigation throughout the website, to suit different types of users... With the intention of making it either easy to find exactly what you are looking for, or to stumble upon something new.

Overview template

There is one of these for each of the three main sections of the website: Art, Photos and Culture. It highlights random features, articles, interviews etc... from each section.

Feature template

One of many text and image based templates.

Exhibit

A photo gallery template for showcasing surf photographers' work in greater detail, with an interview or profile below the gallery as an article.

Section colour

Notice the branding and colours have changed in places... The brand changes over the different sections, to highlight different types of content throughout the site, as an aid to navigation. It also groups content, since the website is divided into different key sections.

Artists & Photographers

There are two of these templates in use: One for surf artists and another for surf photographers. Each thumbnail links to a different creatives' profile/portfolio on the website (see next template). The user can navigate by rolling over each thumbnail to reveal a tooltip with the creatives' name, or they can use the dropdown to the top-right, which simply lists (alphabetically) the creatives.

Creative profile

One of hundreds of surf artist/photographer profiles/showcases. The grid of images to the right is flexible/adaptable to take different flows, sizes and formations of images, to suit different styles of art, and keep it interesting across the templates.

Portfolio

For many artists on the website, this page acts as their only or primary online presence. I'm honoured and stoked that several featured artists & photographers have been sourced (from this website) to work on projects for companies like Billabong, Roxy and Rip Curl.

Blog (grid)

The blog can be viewed in this (more visual) grid view, or as a 'classic' blog layout (see next template). This site has an audience ranging from the young, hip surf grom, right up to the elder stoked out soul surfers... Which creates a wide gap in comfort with technology (i.e. how the hell do I use this website). I decided to offer this option of viewing in an attempt to keep both parties happy.

View the blog >

Blog (classic)

A more generic blog layout, scroll to see each post.

Article template

The Culture section of the site has dozens of articles (written by me) on the history and culture of surfing. Again, the section's colour changes to give a unique experience. These templates concentrate solely on the text.

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