Front-End Development

Request

From a PSD of the homepage, built out a complete theme for an artist’s website.

Solution

In the late 2000s, Sony Music Entertainment (SME) was a major player in the Drupal ecosystem, funding significant advancements in Drupal 6, including contributions to Earl’s Views and Panels through their partnership with Lullabot.

SME operated two large Drupal 6 installations, each hosting around 150 to 180 individual artist websites. Among the artists whose sites we managed were Miles Davis, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Jordin Sparks, Britney Spears, Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Lopez, AC/DC, Slayer, and Ozzy Osbourne.

While everyone on the team contributed to various sites, I only claim full ownership of projects I managed from start to finish. The exception was the AC/DC site, for which I was solely responsible for producing the Flash header.

The process for building these sites was straightforward but intense. You were handed a PSD of the homepage and tasked with creating the entire site from that one document.

My responsibilities included

• creating graphical elements for all sections of the site not included in the original PSD
• building the front-end and integrating it with the Drupal theme layer
• ensuring design consistency across the entire site
• and completing the project under extremely tight deadlines—sometimes as short as four days

Despite the challenges, these projects honed my ability to rapidly prototype, theme, and deliver high-quality, scalable designs for a diverse range of artists.