Tactical SEO guru Matthew Freeman came to me to design a WordPress-powered site for discussing all things related to search engine optimization (SEO), NashvilleSEO.info, or NSI.

Wanting to underscore the Nashville aspect, Freeman asked for something that looked like it was from Nashville. The past ten years or so there has been a trend toward something of a “grunge” approach in album design for country music, most of which comes from Nashville.

So I made something that I call “Nashville Grunge,” with bright colors and gritty textures and a stylized illustration of icons of the downtown Nashville skyline. For a long time the skyline was the biggest challenge, as the illustrations didn’t quite come together, but finally I developed a style that complements the “Nashville Grunge” approach with something flat yet with subtle details.

The most interesting part of the project was coding it so that skyline stuck to the bottom of the window now matter how the page was sized, and parts of the skyline don’t appear until you scroll to the very end.