Wow… I seem to be a glutten for punishment. So this week I start my new job as a marketing professional and I decided to implement a new design, just to make sure I keep myself busy. Ok, but I’m mainly going to talk about the design and I’ll mention the new ‘career’ once I’ve worked there for a bit and have some more info to give.
More Colour!!
Ok, why did I redesign? Easy, I wanted to add some more colour (I’ve seen enough orange for now) and seeing other people redesign just makes me want to do more than I minor tweak. I’d started looking at your standard slew of css gallery websites for some sort of inspiration. I was mainly looking for sites that had a good chunk of colour in them and didn’t look too messy. I’d be lieing if I didn’t say that Matt’s site wasn’t an influence, his redesign has caused a lot of buzz. But I also thought that Massive Blue was appealling. Their influences should be obvious.
Where the Color Goes
I was trying hard to make a redesign that had more colour b/c I felt like the site really needed it. I’ve usually had a couple main colours but I wanted to try and see if I could get away from that. Massive Blue gave me the idea to do coloured bars on a dark background (to make them pop out more) while I borrowed the idea of different coloured links for different sections from Matt. I think that it really helps add some colour to the design. Blue has to do with all the weblog entries, green for the photos section, external links are done in red (this also applies to my quicklinks), purple for information that has to do with me or the site and yellow is my catch all for other sections.
Layout
The biggest change in the layout was going back to a two-column format. The main reason for this was that I found the three-column a little content heavy, it was a lot for the user/reader to take in all at once. I’ve also jumped another bandwagon…. one that involves me embracing my bottom. While the third column has gone poof into thin air, the content still had to be put some where, so why not join the bottom revolution. Can’t wait to learn the secret handshake.
The other obvious change is that I’m now 100px wider. I know this means I’m neglecting the 7% of my readers that are smaller than 900px across, but I think that site still very manageable for those users, not to mention it’s time you guys upgraded with the rest of the internet world. Leggards are usually only the last 16% to adopt, so you guys are falling behind in the times… seriously.
Failed Ideas
Below is a collection of ideas that I did in Photoshop and had a working examples for but didn’t quite make the cut. The last one is close to the current design, but with the menu on the far left still made it a pseudo three-column layout, not to mention my ‘recent photos’ section wasn’t prominent enough for me and that just wasn’t cutting it.
Still Not Finished
While I’ve done a lot of the base work, there are a few pages that aren’t quite finished (so you may reach the odd dead end), but that’s why this is a “live redesign”, doing it right before your eyes. So if you see a column move or a font change here or there, don’t panic, it’s suppose to happen. If you have any ideas/feedback feel free to drop a comment, remember, I prefer positive feedback… I’m sensitive and my ego doesn’t like to be deflated, well at least not too much.
Cheers