Site News - Updates! Redesigns! Oh my!

Photo: tanakawho

After a long winter, its about time to come out of blogging hibernation. But unlike my furry counterparts, I did more than sleep the days away. In fact, I’ve been quite a busy. So if you’ve been scratching your head for the last few weeks, read on and find out what I’ve been up to.

As an aside, the current blog stylesheet is a bit borked. It’s a casualty of the site rewriting, and should be fixed in gif… er, jiff. And without further ado, here’s whats changed.

Site Redesign

The first thing you’ve probably noticed is chrislaskeydesign.com received a makeover. The aesthetics have been dolled up and the structural code has been rewritten, but the original vision is still alive and kicking.

The Aesthetics

From an aesthetic standpoint, the original had all the elements I love as a web designer - liberal use of whitespace, legible typography, a greyscale with a bright accent color(s), and a reserved use of javascript. But for all its good, I wasn’t completely happy with it.

As Leslie Cabarga says in her Logo, Font & Lettering Bible, “The difference between a designer and an actual artist is, a designer can indicate preferences and arrange preexisting graphic elements but cannot draw well enough to bring his best visions to fruition by his own hand.” In short the building blocks where there, but my original vision was realized. I’m still not quite there, but this design is a lot closer.

I moved the navigation bar down from the right hand corner, and extend it the full width of the site. Rather than drawing the eye focus away from the other elements, the new position highlights the logo and instantly defines width of the site content. I repeated the navigation bar in the footer, improving site navigation and lending some consistency to the design as a whole.

But the biggest change to the site is the larger emphasis on typography. The duo of Verdana and Helvetica has been dropped in favor of Helvetica exclusively. On some of the pages a banner of Helvetica font spans the top, easing the transition from the header to the main content and showcasing the aesthetic beauty of large set font faces. And the equalizing of line-heights in the content has made an important, albeit subtle impact, on the design as a whole.

The Structure

The makeover to Chris Laskey Design was more than just aesthetic. In fact, the biggest changes occurred behind the scenes. Not only has the site’s HTML and CSS been rewritten from scratch, the code has been converted from the MooTools Javascript Library to jQuery.

If you’ve ever lived in an older apartment, you know that every apartment shows some scars from its former tenants (a big shout out to my Boston friends who know this all too well). Even with a vigilant caretaker, everything shows its age.

Websites aren’t all too different from apartments. Over time new features are added, taken away, and tweaked to keep up with changing needs. A casualty of ideas run amok, the old websites code started to show its age. And even though it still functioned and validated perfectly (hint hint fellow designers, valid code is not necessarily good code), it needed an overhaul.

Aside from the rewritten code, I also switched Javascript libraries from MooTools to jQuery. Although I’ve become recently infatuated with jQuery’s ease of use (check out the Intouch Demo), I haven’t abandoned MooTools for future projects.

What’s Up With The Blog?

Although most of the website redesign is complete, there’s a few features that will take some more time, most notably the blog. So far the blog’s PHP and HTML code has been successfully rewritten, but the CSS file is still in the works (by default wordpress uses a completely separate CSS file). As a result, the new main CSS file has caused some elements to display incorrectly. I’m working on a short term fix until the aesthetic redesign is ready a few weeks from now.

New Professional Focus

Although I’ve loved freelancing, I’m currently looking for a job at a design firm! The choice was an easy one to make after taking some time to reflect on the last year of full time freelance. A big part of freelancing is wearing multiple hats - the designer, the client hunter, the accountant, the receptionist - and simply put, I’m ready to don a few less in favor of more hours being a full time web designer.

Thankfully I knew all the hats I’d be wearing before I took the leap (due in large part to great resources like freelanceswitch.com). But after a year the excitement of running my own business has started to fade, while my passion for design has grown even brighter. And as much as I enjoy the freelance lifestyle, I’m ready to don the design hat full time - my due apologies to the accountant hat.

Luckily freelancing has been good to me, and I have the ability to be selective about which firms I pursue. So if you’re a group of talented minds with a fellow passion for design, get in touch with me. I’ll even buy you lunch.

New Portfolio Pieces

The combination of thinking big, ravenously learning more, and a love for PHP means there’s a number of long term projects in the works. Although I’m not ready to let the cat out of the bag about them just yet, I have completed a few more pieces to my design portfolio.

I’ll leave the details of each to future blog posts, but for the time being be sure to check out my custom built Ajax/jQuery/PHP/MySQL based CMS, Intouch. Also, I’ve completely redesigned and rewritten the Zenith Travel site, and created a few new photoshop mockups - ASPEX and Anthos Media.

In addition to the new portfolio pieces, I’ve been playing around with Drupal, a virtual server install of Wordpress, CrazyEgg site analytics, and the CodeIgnitor PHP framework. I’ve even cracked open a few O’Reilly books on Actionscript 3.0, so there just may be a return of Flash in the near future.

The Future of the Blog

Nothing will change! I’ll still be updating in my spare time, and although life will be hectic over the next month or so, you can look forward to more (semi) regular updates in the future. You’ll even find more hands on tutorials in CSS/XHTML/jQuery/PHP. And of course, a new aesthetic design will be coming.

So stay tuned, there’s good stuff on the way!