Free Men of the Sea

Free Men of the Sea (FMOS) is a is a living history reenactment group specializing in the portrayal of pirates from the Golden Age of Piracy. I’ve been an active member of FMOS for about 15 years — marauding with my crew-mates at festivals, parades and historical sites around New England. So when the captain of our crew asked me to redesign the FMOS website I said, “Arrrgh!”

The original FMOS website was an ancient hand-coded HTML site; inaccessible to edit or update because the original web designer had passed away without providing anyone in the crew the password. There wasn’t much to salvage from the old site (other than some text) so I decided to start from scratch with a Squarespace template and promptly sent photo requests to everyone in the crew.

Although skeuomorphism design went out of style by the early 2000’s, the new FMOS website needed to have that authentic “artifact” feel, complete with torn edges, sepia-toned images, and 3D nautical objects. I was able to select an faux-antique font (IM Fell English) for the site’s headlines — a choice that I would never have been able to make for any of my other clients.

Because this project was 20% professional gig and 80% labor of love, I also refreshed the FMOS logo. I thought the entire FMOS brand should have a facelift, not just the website. The FMOS logo is a variation of the famous pirate Calico Jack’s pirate flag of a skull with two crossed swords. Our captain added a red hourglass below the swords which signals to our prey that “their time is running out.”

Since the site launched, our crew has received many compliments on the design and content and I’ve been “promoted” to Communications and Propaganda Officer. There’s no real perks to the promotion but, for caution’s sake, I’ve made sure our captain has full admin access to the new website.