Weblog. Comments.

Squawk redesign part 2: Colour palette & illustration

4 Comments // Posted on the 19^th Oct 2007 in Current Projects, Interweb

Welcome to part 2 of the write-up on the new site. In this weblog entry I will focus on the illustrations that I used on this site.

As I mentioned in an earlier weblog post about the requirements for this redesign I wanted to add a personal attachment to this site. By personal attachment I do not only mean something by which a visitor will remember this site, but also something that allows me to emphasise with it.

In the beginning of this redesign process I had a play with words revolving around the existing ‘Squawk’. In fact I did not change the concept of Squawk being onomatopoetic for the noise that a surprised chicken would make when it discovers a juicy worm (Excellent content and design), yet the brainstorming/sketching allowed me to outline the new style of this site.

The colour palette

I started experimenting with a rural image in the background of the page, partially relating back the henhouse/squawk idea, yet this greatly decreased readability: No font renders great on crops.
What stuck was the beige/blue combination. The dark-blue heading just looked great on a light Toscana sky and grey text was very readable on the beige that the image faded out to. The basic colour palette was determined.

The colour palette for the redesign of this site.

Resulting from the many doodles that I did during the brainstorming for this site, a style was born. Below is the first menu that I drew in a small sketchbook. I don’t know where the boards, pipes and gloves came from, but after all this was only one of the first ideas.

One of the first ideas for the menu. The Contact & About sections were later combined and the links themselves transformed into text-only-links

The typewriter

Through some more doodling, the typewriter idea, as means of representing the weblog section of the site, was born. One of my old English teachers used to brag that he had the exact same model of typewriter as Ernest Hemingway, and I remember being rather fond of that particular typewriter as well.

If you think that this is a little odd, take a good look at the next typewriter that you find: Unlike computers they have style and are also much more productive, since you do not get annoyed by emails, update notifications and God knows what.
(Check out WriteRoom, a very productive writing environment for the Mac.)

The typewriter that identifies the weblog section.

The typewriter was later joined by the pencil for the portfolio section of the site.

The doodlebush

On the double page that I drew the typewriter on there were also a great amount of random doodles: leaves, arrows, flowers, gloves and umbrellas.

Two pages from my notebook that later formed the doodlebush. (There were many more, though.)

While the glove hasn’t made it to the final layout due to some negative connotations, all the other elements were mixed in Photoshop to create what I call the doodlebush.

This rather disorderly style is something that you seem to find in quite a bit of my work, and I decided that it was something that could identify me on my website.
By ‘my work’ I obviously do not mean commercial work as not many people would be thrilled to have sketchy lines on their site that is trying to ‘sell a professional product’. Rather I am referring to some of my fine art based work and more importantly my sketchbooks. (In the future I might post some examples from these...)

For those interested on how I created the images that I used in Photoshop: A healthy supply of fine-liners and lots of doodling is all you need.

To be continued

In the next instalment of how the redesign of this site developed, I will focus on font choices and Typography. See you then…

4 Comments