I made this design immediately after making a mockup of the limeade design in Photoshop, so I was definitely very much in the “oooh, black headers look so snazzy” mode of thought still… I went through my email and found a couple of the samples I emailed back and forth to see if I could explain what happened along the way to making the “finished” project.

July 07

This is actually version two, I had made an abortive attempt to come up with a new design, but never got it off the ground. The original design had the UIC logo in the content only, and featured a gray header. I ended up scrapping it.

In any case, at this point I’d already decided on the majority of the color scheme, but the site certainly had a blah look to it. I played around with moving things around and so on, but really wasn’t getting anywhere.

July 19

I went out on a major limb here. The tabs now descend from the top. I also added a dark-gray buffer region between the black header and the light gray content area. I think it would be safe to say that I really was not making much progress in coming up with something eye-catching and yet un-graphic-y. (Yes, that was a design requirement. Un-graphic-y.)

The design languished for awhile in this annoying range of blah-ness, and it made me sad.

July 21

I initially had been playing with the possibility of a sidebar without any visual separation between it and the main content. I added a light border and inspiration struck, it looked sort of like a book! I grabbed my Bible and flipped through it a bit, and added the red text (which normally denote Jesus speaking) and realized the site actually looked like something. Promising.

July 29

This is a screencap of the actual layout that I ended up submitting to the UIC webmaster. (It even works in IE5!) I made the “paper” portions of the page whiter to emphasize the book-like feeling, and made the tabs look more like my file folders.