This site is an ongoing pro bono project that we do for our friends Raphael Bell and Timothy Summers. One of the things that makes life in Charlottesville, Virginia so great is the number of people that share their life’s passion through artistic and cultural events. Rafe and Tim, both Juilliard-trained and world-class musicians, decided to start a Chamber Music Festival in their home town, featuring some of the world’s finest young chamber musicians. We love to support this kind of passion and vision, and have produced free print and web materials for the festival from its inception.

Our goal here was to produce a web site with a lot of pizazz, but to do it in a way that required a minimum of work. Since the festival’s inception, we have built all the graphics around a “signature” musical-themed oil painting produced by Tim’s father David, who is a professor in the Art Department at the University of Virginia. Repeated use of the painting image in various croppings and arrangements has created a look for each year’s festival that is clean, strong, and very professional. The web site follows suit, using the whole painting on the home page and a detail of it at the top of every other page.

There is one design element in this site that we have never tried anywhere else, and, to be honest, we’re still not sure is completely successful. One task that needs to be accomplished on every page of a web site is to keep the user advised about where they are within the site. This is usually a function of how the navigation buttons are treated. Here, Jim chose to build a horizontal master navigation bar across the top of each page and then run a pale vertical band down through the page that highlights a section of the navigation bar. Visually this is a pretty cool feature. The only potential drawback is that the relationship between the vertical band and the other elements on the page can sometimes look a bit accidental. If you have an opinion about how well this works, drop Jim a note at: jim@gibsondesign.com