Living up to her tagline “more than meets the eye”, Liz Crain is a ceramic artist, who specializes in knitted porcelains. Liz is best known for her vessel forms that look like vintage cans.

Back in 2015, ZapTuba built and delivered a completely new website for Liz Crain Ceramics to showcase her “more than meets the eye” ceramic work and to establish an online shop for a selection of her work (for details about the original 2015 project and subsequent updates, click HERE.)

In 2018, we decided to retire Liz’s parent theme as it had not been actively maintained by its developer and was becoming more and more obsolete as WordPress and WooCommerce marched on with major updates and advances. ZapTuba created a custom Storefront child theme for maximum compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress and WooCommerce.

Project Highlights

• customize the look & feel using a combination of a custom responsive child theme and the customization options offered by the WooCommerce parent theme, Storefront
• integrate all applicable customizations from Liz’s previous child theme into the new child theme, adapting the customizations to the new parent theme infrastructure as needed
• ongoing website content updates and maintenance; debug and fix legacy (pre-ZapTuba) issues
• design and prepare production files for collateral marketing & print material
• manage web hosting and domain registration migration/services
• implement measures for GDPR and CCPA compliance

11.2018, updated 4.2021

Michael Cinque is a photographer specializing in street photography, capturing life’s everyday events which most people pass by without noticing.

Having established his collections of photographs on SmugMug, Michael wanted a stylized unobtrusive online gallery to showcase his photographs.  The result is a modern, minimalist online portfolio of Michael’s photographs.

Project Highlights

• logo design
• website design and development using HTML, CSS, and Javascript within SmugMug’s advanced customization framework (pre-2013)
• website customization using HTML & CSS within the new SmugMug framework (2013)
• custom Tumblr theme to coincide with the style of the client’s website
• design and manage production of business cards
• ongoing website content updates and maintenance

11.2009, updated 3.2019

Yoko Nakagawa is a certified professional life coach, who specializes in helping those who work in high-tech and startup environments, particularly those in product development and engineering roles.

Yoko wanted an easy-to-maintain, easy-to-update, bilingual (Japanese and English) website to showcase her coaching & consulting business. Since Yoko did not want to spend too much time worrying about the nitty-gritty details of her website (hosting, updating, security, etc.), ZapTuba recommended that she consider a web-hosting service with an integrated website builder and management tools, such as Squarespace and Weebly. After test-driving multiple services, Yoko chose Weebly for their confirmed double-byte support and easy-to-use website management tools. ZapTuba took it from there: setting up Yoko’s website on Weebly, choosing a base theme and then customizing the theme, catering to Yoko’s tastes and needs.

Yoko was also looking for a simple, modern logo to represent her business online and in print. To highlight Yoko’s biculturalism, ZapTuba wanted to design a logo that incorporated both the meaning of Yoko’s name in Japanese and the representation of her name in English. In Japanese, the name Yoko is 葉子. ZapTuba combined the meaning of 葉子 (leaf) and Yoko’s first initial, to design a clean, graphic logo.

Project Highlights

• Logo design
• Weebly theme customization
• Content editing and curation

8.2015

Liz Crain is a ceramic artist, who specializes in vessel forms that look like vintage cans. More recently she has been exploring the joining of other art media (found objects, mixed media and repurposed pieces, even some of her own) with clay.

UPDATE: This theme was retired in 11.2018, click HERE for details on the new theme.

In anticipation of her exhibit 99 bottles of beer on the wall (May 2015 @ Roscoe Ceramic Gallery), showcasing her series of ceramic beer cans, Liz wanted to modernize her website and blog. ZapTuba designed and implemented a modern, clean, responsive website which showcases Liz’s portfolio of “more than meets the eye” ceramic vessels and highlights Liz’s journey with ceramics through her blog.

In October 2015, we premiered the online shop which carry an array of her pieces for sale.

In conjunction with her solo exhibit Games People Play (March 2018 @ Roscoe Ceramic Gallery), we updated her website to include a special section showcasing her series of games, the inspiration behind them, and the history and strategies associated with the games.

Project Highlights

• create a logo for use on the website
• customize the look & feel using a combination of a custom child theme and the customization options offered by a third-party WordPress theme chosen by Liz
• implement custom post types catered to the information Liz posts on her website (updated 3.2018)
• integrate WooCommerce to power Liz’s online shop
• curate the contents for the website
• setup and integrate MailChimp & Postmark for email campaigns
• design and prepare production files for collateral marketing print material

4.2015, updated 3.2018