John Safran
Benjamin Tollady Design collaborated with popular Australian media personality, John Safran, to design and build his personal website (with content written by his ex-girlfriend).
John Safran is an Australian documentarian, comedian and media personality, well known for his outlandish stunts such as rummaging through Australian television personality Ray Martin’s rubbish in John Safran: Media Tycoon (an early pilot for a TV series), placing a temporary fatwa on the life of Rove McManus, and sneaking nine young men into an exclusive Melbourne nightclub by disguising them as members of American nu-metal band, Slipknot.
A hand-made look
Whilst working directly for Madman Entertainment, I worked closely with John to develop the ‘theme’ and art direction for the site. John had convinced his ex-girlfriend to write the site content, which we wanted to present in a hand-written form akin to notes written by a bitter, vengeful ‘dumpee’. With this as our starting point, we decided to give the whole site a hand-made look with pieces of torn paper and sticky-tape.
In addition to the humorous ‘girlfriend’ content, there was to be more serious, factual content about John, his work and merchandise. The two types of content used across the site were distinguished visually, showing the factual content as a printed page and the ex-girlfriend comments on torn notepaper, using a handwritten font.
Simple content management system
The site was built by hand and incorporates a lightweight PHP content management system, allowing John to update the news section of the site himself.
