ZAP Creative is the design shop of Julie Knudsen, who has been an active professional designer in the Sacramento community for several years. She recently relocated to a new space, and wanted to expand what she offers by pulling together a group of creative professionals to collaborate on projects.

Julie and her husband, Creighton plan to expand the space to make a co-working location for designers and creatives in the Sacramento area.

I joined the group as a web designer and developer and lead the team on the creation of this unique website. While the site looks simple, it includes a great number of innovative and fun touches to subtly enhance the user experience.

It was an extremely fun project to work on and Julie and everyone was amazing to work with. Rarely have I seen projects like this come together.

You can view the live website here:
https://zapcreative.com

Uniqueness Matters

Julie has a very specific philosophy about color, shape and how to activate space, as demonstrated by the space she has created in her studio. I designed this site to reflect her very unique and specific aesthetic. Custom photography by ZAP Creative group member John Pantnaude, and custom typefaces by Zap Creative group member Robbie Woodard really help this site stand out.

Zap Creative members June Steward and Lauren Wagner wrote the copy for the site and managed the social media.

Dante Mutti provided comic relief, as well as invaluable help with design, testing and implementing SEO and battle hardening the WordPress installation.

The Zap Creative site is a completely custom built site, running on top of WordPress, for easy access to content management. It makes heavy use of custom fields and custom content types, which moves it even further away from the normal WordPress website.

While WordPress is the obvious choice for content management, helping with SEO and making basic site management over time simple, there are a number of unique approaches to building this site under the hood that allowed me to be innovative as a designer and developer.

Check out the blog for posts that get into more detail, but I am particularly proud of the JavaScript I wrote for this site to handle lazy loading of large images, as well as the custom Google map at the bottom of the page. That was a particularly fun touch.

Building WordPress themes from scratch is always fun, and there are always small challenges that crop up, particularly when making your product work well across all screen sizes. One example is the interface for the team members in the second section on the front page. Getting those to work correctly for both hover on a computer screen, and touch on mobile devices required some fussy JavaScript. It is this attention to detail that makes web design so satisfying for me as a professional in the field.

Working with ZAP Creative

If you are looking to work with a group of creative individuals, I recommend start by contacting any of the members of ZAP Creative. We are committed to doing great work for clients that we enjoy working with.