Hello World.
In January I vowed not to post to my site again until it was redesigned. I tossed up an interim homepage so I wouldn’t be laughed out of SXSW and called it a day. I was having a block. I thought I wanted a site reflecting my attention to detail and skills as an icon designer. For a while I thought I wanted Jason Santa Maria’s site. I thought I wanted to pull all my digital errata from various corners of the web. I thought I wanted to make rad new icons for the occasion.
I got caught up in the details, and noodling around, I lost sight of what I really wanted; bold, dramatic and simple. Constraint is the best way to foster creativity, so I set some ground rules: broad strokes, one primary color per section, a single typeface (though multiple fonts for different uses were acceptable) and no tchotchkes.
No icons, I don’t need them. No social media junk drawer. No last 5 Flickr photos, and no latest tweet which is probably an @reply to someone you don’t know anyway. None of the latest trends vomited out into a top 5 list on some design blog somewhere. (I hope, I don’t read them.)
I realized I could make things even easier on myself if I emulated another artists’ style. Not only could this prove an interesting experiment, (maybe Mondrian next?), but made most of the visual decisions for me. I’ve always been into to Futura, and Futura and Barbara Kruger go hand in hand. It just seemed the right way to go.
Suddenly after getting rid of everything that was holding me back (including IE), I had a site.
Oh yeah, I’ve got a store now. Eventually there will be more stickers and buttons, and if interest is there, some shirts too. I’m getting back to my illustration roots, so it’s not out of the realm of possibilities prints might make their way into the store. Last but not least, I am launching a comic. Stop by next week, I’m hoping to have it up by Thursday at the latest, it will be published every Tuesday and Thursday after that.
If you see some weirdness in the next couple weeks it’s just me cleaning up, I am still getting a handle on Expression Engine and attempting to tame my .htaccess and get rid of index.php in my URLs.
There are 4 comments
Nice work, big & bold & distinct.
Definitely getting the Kruger vibe, nice one! Only one nitpick with it in general really… your background doesn’t repeat well on larger resolution screens^^
Glad to be back?
Looks awesome, Beth. I love the fonts, breathing room and big sky backgrounds. Something I noticed is that there is no Home button; you have to hack the URL to return to your homepage. Was this intentional or did you forget? I often do!
No home button on purpose
I figured what are the odds someone actually needs to go back to that page? Slim. Yeah some of the backgrounds had to repeat to appear at the scale I wanted, but I actually kind of like some minor flaws like that.
Apologies that there is some URL weirdness on the site regarding index.php in some places, having trouble getting my .htaccess to behave. Hoping to have that resolved soon. Ditto with the search and contact form. Not enough content to have to search yet.
Good to be back though!
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