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Redesign—Purpose and Process
Published 2 years ago, mid-July under Design
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I’ve been thinking and talking quite a bit about design justification lately. I want to discuss why I re-designed, my goals for release two, and what I felt was missing in release one. There’s an obligation to justify my design choices—and not merely because I want to make a case for why this version of my site is an improvement. All design decisions should be justified—reviewing those decisions helps me improve as a designer.
I designed version one over the course of four months. That’s a long time. It took that long because I was unsure of where I was going. I had no goals for the site, no style in mind, and no clue what I would write about. The result was a site designed by accident, not by intent.
Goals
With release two, I aimed to address a few shortcomings of the first release. The rough goals I aimed to tackle were:
- Make content easier to browse and give older content more shelf life.
- Provide an organized and rational layout system for placing graphics and text.
- Re-brand, ditch the juvenile image.
Overall, I wanted to impart a lot more intent into my work. You should be able to ask “Why did you put this here?”, or “What’s up with that color?”. Hopefully I’m one step closer to that with R2.
Layout
The grid for this site is highly irregular, but that’s okay—it works for all of my layout needs. I didn’t have any dimension to base unit sizes on—my site doesn’t have any ad units (and never will) or any other standard widths worth basing the design around. Admittedly, my grid selection was quite arbitrary—frankly, I don’t think that matters. Even if my layout system is based on an arbitrary and subjective call about how wide gutters and units should be—it’s still a system. It’s much more important that I stick to the grid once I establish it.
After a half dozen tweaks, I wound up with 58px units and luxury-lane 20px wide gutters. There are eleven units – a very strange choice for a grid. Good grids are usually divisible by both four and three, to maximize the layout options. I chose eleven to allow for a sidebar of 3 units with two columns of 4 units each. A twelve unit grid would have forced me to make the sidebar either extra tiny (2 units) or extra wide (4 units) in order to evenly fit in two main columns.
Branding
I spent a lot of time working on the logo mark, which you’ll notice is absent from the final design—more on that in a second. The original logo from release one was created when I as in high school—it shows:
Yes, it’s laughably bad. I kept it that small for a reason. So I cleaned it up to something more anatomically correct and simplified the shapes.
Still looks really bad next to my logo typeface, Sabon:
…So I tried sticking it in a square first, then a rectangle:
And the serif type didn’t work next to the hard-edged box so I changed the typeface to Chalet Comprime (which is now used for headlines):
But I lost a lot of character along the way, and the logo mark still isn’t very strong. And a ninja in my logo certainly doesn’t help shed my young image (not that ninjas aren’t totally bad-ass).
So I scrapped it—but not until the last second. It didn’t fit the design goals I wanted to accomplish with the site as it conveyed a wet-behind-the-ears image I want to avoid. I really wanted that logo to work, and I held onto it for longer than I should have. That’s why designing for yourself is always the worst.
Content
Finally, I wanted to showcase more of my content up-front. My entries tend to be time-insensitive, so it’s okay if they sit around in the spotlight for awhile. The first version of the site had a typical blog layout on the homepage, with five long lead-in paragraphs one-after-another. The result—nobody browsed old content. It’s too much effort to scan that much text.
With release two, only the most recent article has lead-in copy. The others have short 1-2 sentence blurbs that are quick to scan. The result has already been noticeable—the older articles on the home page are getting quite a bit more page views and comments proportionally to the old layout.
I still have a bit more to talk about on typography and style, but I will save that for another posting.
Go On, Say It!
I think it is smart to rationalize your decisions as a designer, and it was interesting to see your process. I particularly enjoy the typography used and feel that it flows well with the rest of the layout and colors. It just has a solid feel to it.
I think you will definitely achieve your goals with this layout.
Again, nice work.
I agree entirely — ninjas are totally bad-ass. :)
I also appreciate your honesty when it comes to your grid system. Is it a perfect system in the traditional sense? Nope. But any system is better than no system, and you’ve found one that works for you. Kudos.
Your process is very inspirational. Everything reads very well, the layout leads to exploration as opposed to a scan and abandon. I’ll be keeping an eye on you! Cheers to you Rob.
Thanks for comming and appreciating my design. It’s always great to have positive comments, specially coming from experienced and awarded designers.
By the way, at work, I am currently living the same facet of justifying design decisions. Every step should be followed with something more than “just beautiful”.
Sometimes our creative proccesses tends to be too much subjective, and “booom”, we have something good/new to show. This article gave me a lesson on this subject, specially on the branding and re-branding and all steps you did.
[...] was unveiled last July. Obviously, Rob went through an extensive redesign process: rethinking and justifying every decision behind his site’s [...]
Ninja!?!? I thought it was a Morris dancer!