Make Me A Pin Up

Make Me A Pin Up offers a unique photo editing service aimed at those who love the retro, 1940s / 1950s pin up look.

Customers can upload their favourite pin up photo of themselves, friends or family and have a beautiful, 1950′s pin up poster style finish added to turn their photo into a retro-ised piece of artwork. The artwork can be ordered either as a digital pack (which is emailed straight back to them) or as a print on a choice of postcards, posters or canvases.

The site design plays on the 1940-50′s subject matter by using a muted colour scheme and layout inspired by magazine commercials of the time. The font choices also reflect the period and add to the playful, cheeky feel of the pin up scene.

Homepage design

The homepage for the site took a lot of time to design and develop. The aim was to explain what the site offers and what you will get as a customer as simply and as quickly as possible, while at the same time fitting into the overall design of the site.

In the end I opted to rely on imagery to explain the site the service and what you will get. Showing a visual representation of the entire process; uploading your photo, choosing which package you’d like to buy, and then showing what you’ll get back was a challenge in such a (deliberately) small amount of screen space. I used a real before and after shot of a photo in the graphic to help people understand what the retro editing process would look like. The “after” shot on the right is also marginally larger than the before shot to help highlight that it’s changed.

The icons, photos, fonts and text used on the graphic were all carefully chosen to complement the over all design and tone of the site and the subject matter.

Other bits and bobs

The internal pages of the site give visitors a more detailed explanation of the service, some examples of the photos that Make Me A Pin Up has retro edited and some answers to frequently asked questions.

Every page of the site is designed to reveal just a little bit more information to the user in the hope of enticing them into ordering their very own retro edited, Make Me A Pin Up picture.

Something a little different

I designed the site and the offering as a fun side project and as an escape from the corporate style of the design that I’d done prior to going freelance.

The site has gone down well with both people involved in the pin up scene and those who like the classic style of the time. I marketed the site with a basic Google Adwords campaign and continue to build a following for the site on Facebook.

Skills used

• Interface design
• xHTML & CSS development
• WordPress theme customisation
• WordPress plug-in customisation