New Decade, New (Online) Me

When I created my previous site design three years ago, my motivations for that design were less than artistic: I was dying to do something that was pretty and girlie. At the time, I worked in an office that was all suits and briefcases, corporate blues and blah fonts. It was bit stifling. But even then I knew “because I hate where I work” is not a good motivation for design. It never really felt like “me”, it didn’t do a good job of presenting my work, and all the pages were too long. Most of the graphics, and even some of the text, were images. I always felt the homepage was slapped together. Every time I looked at it, I just felt kinda “meh”, and that’s not where I wanted to be with the face of my business.

A few months ago I was fooling around in Photoshop and a new layout started to take shape. My primary goal was to highlight my favorite projects in the first screenshot. Everything I did revolved around that. I wanted to take some of the pretty out of it, but yet keep it looking feminine.

Techniques I used in this new design represent a change in my web design philosophy, too. Many of the effects - drop shadows, gradients, opacity - are created using more modern CSS3 options. To render the headers, I chose Cufon (http://cufon.shoqolate.com). It was important to me that the headers and some text are in Rockwell, and Cufon is an acceptable solution for achieving this, for now. Most important to me is that I’ve decided to stop butting my head against the wall trying to create a pixel-for-pixel recreation of the design in each browser. I’m going to focus my efforts on creating a nice looking, even beautiful, site in each browser. That doesn’t mean a design has to look the same in each browser, as long as it degrades nicely, because pixel-for-pixel replication is just about impossible to achieve. My focus will include creating light and fast-loading sites, which means avoiding unnecessary background images and always avoiding images of text.

This design was a good learning experience, knowledge I can use in my client projects. Most importantly I’m pleased with how the projects are displayed and the overall look. It’s something that will be fun to play with and experiment on, like my own personal labratory.