Reinvention: Creative Process, etc.

June 02, 2006 | 13 Comments

This is the third in a series of posts documenting and exploring my online reinvention. See this post for more.

What’s gone before

• I’ve decided to lay Asterisk to rest.
• I’ve set down some goals for what I want with my new site
• I’ve tossed around some ideas
• I outlined my goals (split into three groups; content, technical and creative)
• I’ve talked a bit about the specific “features” I’m looking to include

A few decisions made

So, while it’s taken awhile I’ve actually made some progress on this. I’m almost to the point where I can begin actually building it out. I’ve decided to use my dkeithrobinson.com domain and make a clean break from Asterisk. This doesn’t mean Asterisk is going away, it’ll still be here, only that I’m going to start a completely new site over at dkeithrobinson.com.

This means a totally new “brand”, CMS, design, etc. While I’ve still not decided on a CMS and I’m exploring my options there, I have done some work on my new identity and design. Quite a bit in fact.

Creative

Last time I talked a bit about my creative goals for this project. I mentioned that I was going for something that really reflected my personality. I mentioned primary colors, rock and roll, contradiction, boldness, etc.

I did quite a bit of “research” and finally settled on going with something that had a rock poster feel. I wanted something clean, yet slightly off. Something warn and inviting, yet bold and challenging at the same time. That’s the contradiction I’m talking about. I wanted to use primary colors (yellow, blue and red), bold type and a worn, silkscreened feel. I also wanted to do something that I’d not seen much of on the Web. How well I’ve done that will remain to be seen, but even though what you’re reading here might not seem that original, I think it’s coming together nicely and very unique.

Anyway, this process has been taking quite a long time and while I’ve got lots of sketching and screwing around in Photoshop I could show or tell you about, I’m going to keep it at a few teasers.

The color scheme is, as you might expect, based on primary colors. I’ve also worked out a “mark” of sorts based on the whole primary color theme. I’ve tried for shades that are complimentary, rich and a bit more friendly than the pure primary shades. I actually really like where it’s going.

For my main typeface, which you’ll see a bit of in the final design, I chose a wonderful typeface from Fountain called FTN Farao. Peter Bruhn, Farao’s designer says about his inspiration for Farao:

There’s something warm-hearted about old ephemera-letters that clutch together, wacky baselines, spilled ink, bad paper and a mix of letters from different typefaces. None of which would be considered good type & printing, but still feels so much more alive than many of today’s gridbased fonts.

It’s really a nice, funky and off-kilter font that I think will work really well for the feeling I’m going for.

Information Design

I’ve also spent a bit of time working out the layout of the various templates I’m going to need. I started with an interior article page, as I feel that, when it comes to blogs, this is the most important page.

I didn’t do a honest to goodness IA process, preferring to keep it kind of loose. As I’m in total control I’ll probably mess with it quite a bit once it’s into HTML and I didn’t want to spend lots of time doing anything formal.

I’ve worked out a quick and dirty zone diagram that loosely lays out the content for each of my major pages. I’ve got a bit of a cleaned up example that’ll show you my homepage layout as well as give you a bit of a preview of the color and typeface.

With all of this done I’m almost ready to begin work on the templates. I’ve got a feeling that once I’ve got all this into HTML I’ll do a bit of tweaking and I’ve not actually done a whole lot of design on the actual content itself. I prefer to see things in their almost final form before I get too far there.

It’s coming along, admittedly slowly, but it’s coming. My hope is that once I’m done I’ll be able to live with this for quite a while and go back to writing.

Filed under: Reinvention
Keyword Tags: design creative+process IA

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