Art Direction and Design: Chris Young/Harrison Boyce
Updates: Chris Young/Harrison Boyce
Product Photos/Writing: Chris Young
Working at MacNeil Bikes/World Bicycle Sports was the Swiss army knife of all jobs. You really had to be good at all kinds of things, because we had to do it all ourselves, and do it quickly and as inexpensive as possible, because there just wasn’t the budgets to hire external companies. At the end of the day, if you didn’t do it – it didn’t get done. Working on the MacNeil website as part of a design team is the perfect example of the Swiss Army knife concept, as it was an ever-evolving entity with a couple of us working on different components of it over the years.
The site has continually undergone several cosmetic changes, ranging from simple to more dramatic, with the site’s underpinning framework staying in tact. You can see an example of such a cosmetic change when the site switched from the darker background (the first four images), to the new lighter background in the images above. Mixing up the appearance of the site with little work compared to constantly redesigning new sites every couple years helped us put money back into other areas of the budget where it was needed.
The website has continued to change since the design’s inception back in 2005, and is still live today utilizing much of the same framework. During this time while I was Art Director at World Bicycle Sports, I worked on various components of the website, ranging from shooting the product photos, colour-correcting and cleaning up the images, writing the specifications content, and updating the ‘news’ section at least three or four times a week with team photos and videos. The website constantly needed graphics created, and featured news posts with expanded content creation with more than a simple news post.
Shown are examples of the product photos/layouts and the writing at a time when I was heavily involved with the website.
See also MacNeil Bikes 2007 Catalogue and MacNeil Bikes ads.
See all projects tagged with ‘MacNeil Bikes’.
