New Website Design and New Logo Design

Well, the last site design was live for only a couple weeks before I changed it into the current goofy/sunny design you’re looking at now. This design started out as my first attempt to release a free/custom wordpress theme, but after staring at it for a while I realized that I liked it too much to share. Also the code isn’t very friendly.

From start to finish this site took 2 weeks to develop. About a week and half for the design and 3 days to code. Not too bad!

In the initial meeting and consultation with clients I like to prepare a pdf of other materials to get a feel for what the client is looking for in terms of design style and inspiration. The start of this design wasn’t any different. I found a couple pieces that struck me, and used those pieces as jumping off points for my new design

• http://www.squawkdesign.com/weblog

  I really liked the navigation elements. Before looking at this page I was going to use boring “Arial” as the typeface for my navigation. The Squawk site made me realize that using images will work out fine. Just be sure to include the alt text.

• FWA wallpapers

  The FWA is a pretty cool site in its own right, showcasing the best of the web everyday, I fell in love with their wallpaper selection a while ago and have about 50 of them cycling every 15 minutes as my background. The following images provided the inspiration for the major header elements of my site.

• http://octwelve.com/

  I love how this site looks, I’m super jealous and I wish I could illustrate a character, or maybe some birds in the header of my design.

  Anyway, I didn’t take any specific design elements from Mary Luc’s site, more of the general feeling. She’s got a fun, kinda whimsical feeling to her site, and I tried to convey the same thing with my design.

If you’re curious, the design of my last site is below. Let me know what you think about the new design, especially if anything is broken.

Micek