Travis Neilson: Designer, Thinker, & Photograph-taker

I am deligh­ted to announce today that I am publishing a new, or rather upda­ted, design. I have had a few things jum­ping around inside of my mind for a little while and I feel like this design re-think goes a long way to address them.

I wan­ted each entry to tell a uni­que story, visually as well as contextually.

My Main Concern

I really loved the pre­vious design and thought that it said a lot about who I am as a desig­ner. My con­cerns, howe­ver, were mostly with how the post sty­les rela­ted to each other and to the home­page (which is the main forum of the web­site.) The home­page con­tai­ned a tagline which I feel was very impor­tant to con­vey the mes­sage of who I am as a crea­tive: a desig­ner, a thin­ker, and a photo-taker. This tagline, howe­ver poig­nant, was ill-fit on the post pages them­sel­ves. So there deve­lo­ped a 114 pixel chasm bet­ween what as seen on the home­page and on the indi­vi­dual post pages. This may not sound like a big deal, but when I intro­du­ced a new style of post design where every post has the poten­tial to be uni­quely desig­ned, that 114px became a gla­ring obstacle.

re-thinking the web­site iden­tity allo­wed more fle­xi­bi­lity to let the posts have their own voice.

an exam­ple of a ‘uni­que’ post entry.

Iden­tity: Redefined

I tried to find a way to keep my iden­tity as the “desig­ner, thin­ker, & photo-taker” appa­rent but at the same time allow room for each post to create a voice for them­sel­ves. The solu­tion was to mini­mize the real-estate that the web­site used for iden­tity pur­po­ses, but to pro­nounce it further with color. The little 25px strip at the top of this post beco­mes the ulti­mate expres­sion of this web­si­tes iden­tity. The word desig­ner takes the vie­wer to a com­plete list of all the posts under the cate­gory of design, as do the other tit­les in the tagline. I felt that this was a good start but something impor­tant was mis­sing. The red aste­risk, which for all intents and pur­po­ses is my logo, was being left out of the equa­tion. Finally I deci­ded that the mark would do well to stay where it was, and that each uni­que post would inte­ract with it in dif­fe­rent ways, or ove­rrule it altogether.

one of my favo­rite new fea­tu­res: a ran­dom post slider.

cate­go­ries are now bro­ken down even further.

Twea­kin’ Tweaks

I took full advan­tage of this oppor­tu­nity to re-align the iden­tity and cen­tral mes­sa­ges of the site. The theme of desig­ner, thin­ker, & photo-taker is carried through every part of the site: the tagline ele­ments them­sel­ves are cate­gory links, the archi­ves page is now repre­sen­ted by this theme also. The “enjoy a ran­dom post” links at the bot­tom of every post now con­tain more from each cate­gory. The “About Me” is now extinct, repla­ced by a sexy little slide-down panel that is more suc­cinct and meaningful.

It’s been one of those all con­su­ming pro­jects, and I am very happy to be done with it. I would hate to reveal how much time I sank into this design refresh — but I will say that if I told my mom, she would say I should go outside and play more like a nor­mal kid. (I’m 27 btw.) Love you mom.

I hope that this article makes it clear why I did this and what I was going for. I’d love to hear what you think, please leave your com­ments there below. — Do you think that this rede­sign has been sucess­ful? Why or why not?