Tales of a Redesign [Part 1]

Everything was going great until Dan Cederholm ruined my redesign. At least that was the thought going through my mind last November, as I compared the newly styled Simplebits in my left hand monitor, to a remarkably similar photoshop file which housed a mockup of a new Crashpod design that I had just settled on the night before. I was finally done, ready to start translating this new layout into its final HTML markup.

Sadly, this was not to be.

I mean come on: no web designer, developer, hell even user is going to believe that my blog just “happened” to share the same dark blue header, squarish green logo and off-white background that Cederholm just rolled out. And of course since Simplebits has a readership that numbers somewhere in the oh I don’t know, hojillion times as many as Crashpod, trying to argue that this was merely coincidence was going to be futile. I’d be labeled as a rip-off artist the second my site hit the web.

I realize now, that this was the best possible thing that could have happened at the given moment. In truth, I owe Dan a debt of gratitude, as being forced to re-imagine Crashpod at the last minute in this fashion really brought me to the realization that the design I had come up with was just the same old basic 2 column layout with a stripe of blue and a different colored background. It was stale, to say the least.

The root of this problem is that I tend to mock up sites solely in Photoshop, which often drives me to worry far too much about which green should be in the header or what color the background of the body should be. Instead of this method, I decided to go old fashion, opting to grab a nice felt pen and a big book of blank paper. A few days worth of sketches later and I had the information architecture you see on the site now, a big change from Crashpod’s layouts of the past!

So thank you Simplebits, for encouraging me not to just put a different color on the same layout over and over again, but rather to let the content drive what I put on the page.

Next time try not to do it at the last minute though, ok?