By Nat Taylor, Intern

My first week at Pearse Street went well. I’ve already learned a great deal about web design, most of which has surprised me. Running a successful web design business is no cake walk. The team has to constantly push to get projects out the door yet stick to our strict quality standards. After many combined hours of hard work the result is an elegant and effective web presence for our clients.

On the coding side I’ve already remembered and learned more about how important it is to be creative in the design process. Even for things that seem cut and dry there is always room for innovative solutions. I spent several hours last week tweaking a CSS stylesheet just to rid a layout of a few black pixels that weren’t getting hidden properly. It was tedious but necessary for the quality of the site.

I also remembered how important it is to use all of your resources. Photoshop brushes can help you speed up creating impressive work. Web design would be impossible with out the using the support of the design community.

Its unfortunate I only have two weeks left of my internship, but it has already been quite rewarding.

The new media office at Shady Records contacted us to create a professional MySpace design for Eminem’s famous Detroit-based band, D12. Pearse Street decided this was to be the mother of all MySpace pages. We put our design skills and tech-knowledge in high gear to build an interactive Flash flipbook featuring each band member, with a special tribute to late member, Proof.

Pearse Street stayed true to the almost gothic quality of the D12 style, straying from the popular hip hop “bling” and representing the down and dirty visuals of the city streets. Behind the scenes, this custom MySpace layout is updating by a fully-customized content management system that allows text and audio updates to be made through an admin panel independent of MySpace. Check out the page at www.MySpace.com/D12

This project lead the way for Pearse Street’s subsequent work with Shady Records’ parent company Interscope Records. Pearse Street was hired to design a series of interactive Flash banners to use in a viral marketing campaign promoting the Re-Up album. These banners can be found on the various MySpace pages and websites of the following artists: Eminem, 50 Cent, D12, Bobby Creekwater, Lloyd Banks, Shady Records, Ca$his, and Stat Quo. In two months these banners received over 5 million views, which all considered a great success!

In the fall of 2006 Pearse Street was contacted by Fox TV’s Talkshow with Spike Feresten to create a “pimped out” profile for an upcoming guest of the show. The unsuspecting 14-year-old Dylan Alfonso was about to get a complete life makeover, including hair cut, milk bath, prom date(s) and a professional pimped MySpace page. During filming, Spike presented Dylan with his new custom MySpace design. Check out the video clip here: Dylan and Spike

While we design for a broad range of clientele, it was an interesting experience to tune into what an adolescent mind would want their MySpace page to look like. It was a great honor to have our final design display on the silver screen too!

Talkshow writer Adam Felber had this to say about his MySpace design experience with Pearse Street:

“Pearse Street really got it done for us – quickly, professionally, and with great creativity. The next time we need some online design, we’ll come calling again.”