I’ve been slacking on finishing this page for some time. This project got onto one of those timelines where I did 80% in 5 days, then the last 20% in 5 weeks. All you designers know how that goes.
For now, there are still some kinks to work out, and some more portfolio pieces to put up. But I think we’re good to go with what I have up as is. Hope you enjoy. Please leave me some feedback – I like to know how my work looks to the general public.
Been working really hard on the redesign for the homepage. It’s taking way longer than I though, but the time spent is very much worth it. I’m trying to use every bit of what I’ve learned in the web development world and make it all work together. Today’s sample is taken from the new navigation.
In keeping with my whole whitespace movement, I wanted to leave things as simple as possible. So everything is real clean with a focus on the typography. The little snail on the left is the icon for the homepage. Since I decided to not go with a traditional layout (branding logo on the upper right, navigation to the left and underneath), the little snail functions as a sort of branding and link back home. That will help on the following pages when we get further and further away from the front page.
Hope to have the finished product for you all by next week. Don’t want to give you anything less than that, though.
My 9-5 gig is at a magical place called Seton Hall University, at the Teaching Learning & Technology Center. The bulk of my time is spent developing on the Movable Type Enterprise system, which hosts the 100 or so odd blogs that we maintain (“we” = me and 2 others on our team). Movable Type can be a pretty rigid system, which is why I personally use WordPress for Snailbites. So when I actually get something to look relatively cool, its quite a personal victory for myself.
I have some problems with the standard, out-of-the-box template that MT slaps on your blog when you first create it. It’s only editable to an extent, and every site you create ends up looking the same. Here’s a shot of the default blue.
Click to see a sample page
Check out where the banner image is – right in the middle of the page! How are you supposed to brand or theme anything? Also, the tabs in the top navigation are gigantic, so you can’t have too many pages, or links with too many words.
To counteract this dilemma, I cooked up a new theme with a purposefully large banner image area, and smaller navigation. I call it Razor (corny, I know). Late Friday afternoon, we put up a new site for a project called Metro SHU. This site is basically supposed to provide a bridge from the SHU community in South Orange, NJ, to the not-too-distant playland that is New York City. I used my new Razor theme for it. Check it out:
Click here to visit Metro SHU
You’ll notice how instantly branded this page is now thanks to the sick banner that Truz made. Here are some of the reasons why I love this theme:
There’s plenty of other themes I’ve made for our blogging platform. I’m sure in my impending creativity-deadlocked days, I’ll post the rest. But for now, enjoy Metro SHU. I hope by the time you see it, it still looks as good as how it does in the screenshot.