I’ve been sitting on the site redesign for so long its frustrating. Hopefully I can scratch together some time over the next weekend :X

One thing that drives me nuts about having pretty photoshop mockups is that they have a tendency to stay merely pretty mockups because I spend so much time tweaking and moving and so on and so forth, and its so boring to make XHTML/CSS layouts…

Oh well, here’s another teaser pic…

Replacing my blog template has been in the makings for… a long time now. Hope to decide what I want to do with the footer any moment now.

Additionally, some similarly juicy things have also been in the makings for awhile. Andrew discussed it previously, but the “secret project” has been momentarily stalled while we tried to make pretty pictures. (He went to San Francisco, I went to Tahoe. He took photos, I used photoshop…)

PS: to celebrate my sudden burst of creativity… I redid porkbuns.net to actually look cool again. Check it out. (Please? I sure hope someone reads this :()

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.