For some reason, doing a design for this site was harder than others I’ve worked on in the past. Maybe I was driving myself into paralysis by wanting it to be too perfect. But, what I eventually decided I needed to do was crank something out. I did just that the other night.
I have always had solid design sense and can navigate my way around Photoshop in a very competent fashion; however, I have had my nose buried in nothing but code for the past couple of years with very little opportunity to do any graphic design. So, I had to knock the dust off.
As I was working on a design for this site, I wanted to created something slightly edgy with lots of potential for change down the road. Since my goal with SeanASullivan.com is to write and share a variety of things related to my life, I felt it best to take that into account. I, myself, am a very dynamic person so I needed some colors and design sense to help convey that.
After going through a few ideas, a lot of which seemed like the standard Web 2.0 schemes (yes at one point I even had my name reflected at the top) I decided that the “grungy” look would suffice. I grabbed a picture of myself from playing at Furrier Farms this past August and did some cool vector drawing effects on it. I used some inspiration from Adobe’s Kuler site to help me ultimately decide on some colors. The starting point for these colors was in part from my love for beer and Irish culture— thus searching the site with the keyword “guinness” for some ideas. I had to add in my favorite guitar in the world, the Gibson ES-335 and what fuels me, coffee.
The luggage tag was a cool effect and gave me a little canvas to outline the three categories I plan on focusing on with SeanASullivan.com— development, music, and life. Maybe I’ll make those useful and clickable in the future when I have a free moment.
So stick around. I realize a lot of you will be reading my posts through your favorite RSS reader in the future, but make sure to stop back every now and again.
“For some reason, doing a design for this site was harder than others I’ve worked on in the past.”
-No kidding. Building my own site took forever and a day. Perhaps it’s because I had a grand idea in my head - and getting that into something real and coherent was such a bigger task. Plus - as a designer - so also the perfectionist. Nothing was good enough until I finally just sat down and hammered something out.
I did however work out a decent design process:
1 - make list of words that convey the site purpose, audience, feeling, etc.
2 - create thumbnails - not much larger than matchbook - of possible layouts
3 - collect inspiration from things on the web that I like
4 - basic photoshop and html layout
5 - move on to advanced design and development
That seemed to work, but it still wasn’t easy…