I worked through a number of design changes to Soule Designs in August and meant to write about the various iterations but never got around to it, so here we go! My goal was to refresh the look of Soule Designs while adding a more flexible area to showcase my work. I also wanted to integrate the blog much more tightly with the look and feel of the site while retaining a Google Blogger back end to avoid reinventing the wheel.The ultimate result is what you see here, but here is the progression beginning with the original site's style before any rework...
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Original Soule Designs site from 2010, looks good but a bit dark and getting stale |
As a first step I reworked just the content area of the home page to allow displaying larger graphics and included a sort of Flash Gordon device to allow browsing my work. There was also a permanent "Contact Me" in the footer, however I just was not happy with the old color scheme anymore.
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The "Browse My Work" control was rendered with Maya though it was scaled down so much of the detail was lost :-( |
After this version I decided to toss out pretty much everything and start over - so much for a simple redesign! Here was the initial completely restyled look, I liked the color scheme but the 3D television model created in Maya doesn't work well here because we're looking at it dead on, I could have used Illustrator and achieved the same effect! Also, the page was a bit too long for older browsers to get the key information without scrolling. Not to mention no navigation, footer, etc...
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Using the TV as an image rotator was good in theory, but not in practice |
Finally, the lovable and refined Soule Designs you see today was born from all those various revisions.
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That'll do site, that'll do |
In the end I decided to completely remove any works from the home page in lieu of a clean bold message. All works now reside on one common area with large icons for easy touch browsing from mobile or tablet devices.
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I've been a busy bee! |
This blog is still hosted with Google Blogger, I just attached my own style sheets to get the look pretty much seamless with my main site, excellent!