still love showing this work. Back around 2006 I worked for a local Michigan photographer, Tom Roche. The first big challenge on the list was building a custom website portfolio and printing custom physical portfolios to take up to the advertising agencies.
The website portfolio let him swap out galleries of different photography styles inside a Flash-based experience filled with animation. This really set him apart from the competition—both in design sensibility and in how his work was presented. I knew we’d have to write custom code and essentially pioneer this kind of portfolio; no one had built one quite like it at the time. The design style was minimal, with intentional neutral tones that allowed the photography to truly shine.
The site became a huge success. It generated a lot of conversation among people in the design and advertising industry, both new and established. It was a proven working model with a simple custom back-end dashboard that required no coding at all—very similar to the WordPress interfaces we see today. The public-facing front end, though, was fully custom Flash, complete with sound and animation that matched Tom’s modern design sensibility.
The site brought more work to Tom’s studio and more work to me. I still remember the passion of working with “T”—problem-solving through creative thinking, working ideas out so they wouldn’t be forgotten. Taking chances with new ideas was a big part of it.
The leave-behind flip books were another example of successful studio marketing. Custom flip books were always in high demand and usually filled with new images. The larger printed portfolios served as the more formal presentation pieces we took into agencies.
I can still feel the ambition, high energy, creative thinking, and excitement of those days as a young designer working with Tom. This was also the studio that gave me my first retouching job, which opened the door to a lot more work in advertising across the Midwest and around the world.
