With the layout of my custom home page I wanted to focus on keeping my content fresh and up to date. And where would my layout be without the 960 grid system? A huge thanks to Nathan Smith for his contribution to the design community. Caleb White also lent me a hand with his ninjastic WordPress custom field knowledge. Matt Simo was a huge help to me with all the WordPress custom functionality. Of course though, tutorials aren't the end-all-be-all solution, and that's when I turned to some of my friends for help. But thanks to Ian Stewart, and his wonderful 11-part How To Create a WordPress Theme Tutorial, I was able to get some much needed help. "The humbleness and transparency in your words can now be identified in your new mark." Layoutīuilding a theme from scratch is no easy task. I love what my friend Josh Hemsley wrote about it: I have always been a fan of doing things by hand, so hand-drawn type was something that always appealed to me. The personal touch I put on my brand is probably my favorite part of this new design. Here are some of the preliminary sketches I made: So I sat down one day and started sketching out some ideas when it clicked that I shouldn't settle for some "off the shelf" font, but create a unique, one-of-a-kind, font that embodies who I am. The idea of doing my identity by hand didn't occur to me until I had exhausted all other possibilities. My biggest problem in the beginning of this new design was trying to find the right font to express who I am. I decided to take a break and put things on the back burner. And my name in Archer was close, but no cigar. However, I like the oversized illustration (courtesy of Brad Colbow) that is prominently displayed in the header. The second approach held a little more weight in the personality department, but I still wasn't happy with the layout. Either that or I was craving some Andes chocolate mints. I was trying too hard to appeal to all the inspirations in my head. My first attempt was safe and predictable. And believe me, problems will arise.Īs you can see I was having a major identity crises. Where will you turn when you run in to a problem with your design? If you don't have any initial plans laid out ahead of time it will be more difficult to work through those issues when they come up. Basically what I'm saying is you can't have one without the other. In the same way, making a website without a wireframe is just asking for trouble. Now of course you could eat cereal with water (I've done it before) or fly a kite with some dental floss, but the taste wouldn't be as good and the resistance to the wind wouldn't be as strong. You can't eat cereal without milk, you can't fly a kite without string and you sure as hell can't create a website without wireframes. But nonetheless, I am here to share my experiences with you and hopefully we can learn something together. Some ideas were better than others, and some were just down right ugly. So let's re-focus our attention on the choices I made that lead to my redesign. I wish to spread the details out over three parts instead of trying to fit everything in to one gigantic post. As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to save all the mushy design details for this post.
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