ZooiblogPortfolio redesigns and coconuts
- Jennifer
- Hayo Bethlehem
- Christian Montoya
- Steve P. Sharpe
Many of you (or at least many Mac users among you) will be familiar with the Coconut Flavour apps by Chris Sinai (donate some money, it’s for the good of the apps). Of his hand comes coconutBattery, one of the best battery guard dogs I’ve seen. When I was checking his site, I noticed that coconutIdentityCard didn’t have a nice icon, so I offered him my skills. Out rolled my first application icon for OS X.
Am I reading this correctly? A redesign you say?
Yes, it was about time! My previous design was of late 2004, and my style in both coding and designing has changed vastly. Next item to redesign will be this very site, but that will take a while. For now, let’s talk about the portfolio.
First of all, take a thorough yet elegant look at my portfolio (if it sends you to the blog, clear your cache please). Not only is it now one page, it’s also big tasty chunks simpler. It’s blue with red. It’s got tiny screenshots and previews. I prefer it like this. I think the overview is handy. It shows quite quickly who I’ve worked with, what my style is and what kind of work it involved. Take one Steve P. Sharpe who didn’t even know I designed Flidget until I showed him my work in progress screenshot. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but at least now there’s a real overview. Check it out. It has some work that never, until now, was featured anywhere.
I divided the page into four columns in my head, and even though they’re not obvious, the grid system did help me a lot getting the alignments nice without having to worry about column widths. They’re all equal. I got rid of a lot of markup and made some common items a tad more generic. It degrades better than the previous design. Did I say I prefer it like this?
Funny sign of the times, though, it feels like this is the first redesign of 2006 (or the past six months, really) without any AJAX or Web 2.0 stuff in it (or well, maybe there is; depends on your definition of the terms. Bah). The reasoning is simple: I didn’t need it. That would seem like a very sensible standpoint, but for some reason, few think about that when designing something. “Ohmygosh this looks cool” didn’t get my preference over “this works”. Sign of my times.