Evolution not Revolution As we already have business cards etc. which use the logo and colour scheme from the last redesign I couldn’t change things too drastically
When I decided to take the plunge and work for myself as a web professional full time in March of this year one of the first things I did was design my brand. Even though prior to this I had a website (that in itself went through 3 definite redesigns, I had been freelancing alongside my day job for around 4 years after all) the design had never been anything more than whatever I was interested in at the time.
When web design became my day job I relished the notion that I would have more time to spend working on both the design and content of my business site and I began designing.
Unfortunately I had made one significant mistake in all of this, my assumption that working as a web designer full time would give me more time was way off the mark. What actually happened, as I am sure those of you whom have done simlilar things will already know, is that now that I was relying solely on my work as a web designer for my income I spent all my time doing client work trying to make enough money to eat and when finally I had finished all of that the last thing I wanted to do was design for myself.
This had a pretty damaging effect on the last version of my website, it meant that what was supposed to be a well thought out carefully implemented design process turned into a rather large mess, things would lurch forward between client work and stagnate again until the next break in the clouds. What was even worse was that once I had started there was know going back, I needed a website. Without one my chances of impressing new clients would be severely damaged especially since, as a new company all my work was for local small business, my website needed to be impressive enough to allow me to bid for larger projects with confidence. The fact that I needed things online yesterday meant that I had little time to test things properly meaning my original thinking and ideas were not fully realized. All in all the previous design ended up being too large and too messy (the grid was none existent and the vertical rhythm forgotten).
What your seeing now is my answer to these problems, its not finished, but its finished enough to be online, it can evolve over time. With the 5th iteration I have worked with what I had before, I’ve cleaned it up and have hopefully produced something more elegant, more mature and I hope you like it.
I am planning to document the different aspects of the design in future posts, I have done some new things with Wordpress that I have never done before and I am keen to write about those, I also want to write more about my experiences in setting up as a lone web developer / designer.
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