the money club

The Money ClubA new site went live today, for the forthcoming publication of The Money Club, an updated edition of a book first published in 2001 by my wife Hazel when she was at Random House Australia.

Hazel is now Commissioning Editor at Murdoch Books (whose website is also my work) but the authors, who like many of both Hazel and my clients either already are or soon become family friends asked me to design a website for them.

Incidentally, if that leads you to wonder how much of my work has been generated through contacts of Hazel, I’ll come clean right now and give full credit to Ms Flynn for generating at least ten web projects for me just in the last two or three years.

Anyway, The Money Club tells how a group of Sydney women involved in a book club became interested in investing as a group in the stock market. The investment club they formed has gone on to build up a handy share portfolio that delivers better than average returns.

As well as updating the book to take into account market and economic factors from the last seven years Emily, Frances, Dianne and Di are also branching out into PDF kits for people wanting to start their own clubs or just trying to get a bit of control over their finances, as well as some public speaking and setting up a national register of investment clubs.

Having such a specific (and solitary) item to work off, I found myself considering the technique I’d read about on Dave Shea’s site about taking the elements of a colour scheme from whatever images you have to work with.

Being a clever clogs, he’s set something up where different images are displayed on the page and the colour scheme is based on colours from that image. But I just wanted to explore the notion of choosing from a website colour scheme from a palette defined by a single object.
In this case, I had the cover of the new edition of the book.

This book’s colour scheme is focused on wine red, coffee and cream colours which I guess comes pretty naturally out of a group of people meeting over wine and coffee to talk money.

I used some of the other colours from a group author photo for text highlights and backgrounds.

It’s a good technique that gives the designer the satisfaction of knowing that their colour choices are based on something more than just a feeling that it looks good. It certainly works in bonding elements of a web page, and it still leaves a lot of room for artistic choice.

The book’s cover also uses some very specific images that I was able to imitate and build into the website design: coffee and red wine (again), calculator, paper & pencil. And I used the covers of some the authors’ other books for some extra colour detail.

Overall, the visuals are a bit busier than I wanted them to be but the whole site comes up pretty well, I think.