SKAGGS Blog

Sketches to Stylesheets: A Fully Customized Site

Phil Campbell produces artwork, storyboards and concepts for the video game industry. He’s worked as a Creative Director for Electronic Arts on the Godfather and the James Bond series, as Senior Designer for the Tomb Raider series, and as Architectural Designer for Legoland UK. He now lives, works and blogs in San Francisco.

“Phil Campbell creates fantastically detailed and nuanced drawings. He’s worked on scripting and producing some of the coolest creative projects of the last decade; most importantly, he’s written dialogue for Nancy Drew, which basically made my year.”

— Elspeth Maxwell, Senior Designer

Resident comic book expert (and Senior Designer at SKAGGS), Elspeth played the part of Creative Genius™ on Phil’s website. Consulting with Rainbows and Unicorns and sometimes Bradley and Robbie, she worked out a design that would best compliment Phil’s artwork and blog.

“We’ve worked with Phil on his site and brand identity for more than a decade. It’s always a pleasure working with him. Not only was he open to our creative ideas, he provided many himself.”

— Bradley Skaggs, Creative Director

“From the website creation point of view I really enjoyed putting together an example project for the ancient, ancient game Joust,” says Web Developer and video game aficionado Robbie Edwards. “This brought me back to my days of videogaming as a kid. Back then, we had paper routes uphill both ways, 8-bit gaming machines and single button controllers for the Atari and those funky number pad controllers from the Coleco Vision.”

Complete Behind-the-Scenes Control

The object of the website was to give Phil total control over his whole site, so he can upload his extensive portfolio and write blog posts to his heart’s content. From the design point of view, each page is utterly unique, as we lovingly lavished attention on each one. Every background image is appropriate to its portfolio section, be it Lara Croft: Tombraider, Godfather: The Game, or the James Bond series. Each page background image is dictated by Phil himself.

“The site does such a great job of showcasing all of Phil’s images, videos and storyboards; you could explore it forever. It’s visually pleasing to look at and you want hang around and look at more.”

— Robbie Edwards, Web Designer

“Even as we were designing the site, Elspeth and I got obsessed with looking through Phil’s work,” says Robbie. “It became difficult at times to focus on the programmatic side of this project when you had galleries and galleries of video game story boards, sketches and videos in front of you. Overall, amazing project to work on. The only thing missing from making this the perfect project was a side of bacon to go with each page.”

Explore the inside of Phil Campbell’s brain. Browse artwork, scripts, architectural sketches, comics and blog posts at: www.philcampbelldesign.com

POSTSCRIPT: Digging into Phil’s portfolio prompted a few gasps from Robbie. When it was discovered that Phil had done some of the original storyboard artwork for Spryo, he was all like “You’re kidding me! Spyro??” See, Robbie is a long-time gaming fanatic. Having hosted his own radio show for years and interviewing some big names in the video game industry you would think he would be able to keep his composure,
act cool and look confident, but you get him around some old artwork for
Spyro and that just all falls apart.