02.04.09
Is This Thing On?
A redesign was imminent in my mind. I’d been toying with a few designs, as I typically do, since summer of 2008 with the idea to get the whole site into a CMS and manage it as a collection of output I create.
The small breakthrough came when The Girl™ and I went to Key West this January for a bit of a breather from some of the flurry of both work and personal activity. As noted before, it’s a place we love dearly. It enabled me to see the wood for the trees and clear some of the detritus that’s been hanging on for dear life.
When we returned, I felt refreshed as usual and committed to getting this design out. It started with a few design studies and looking at some of the earlier iterations of this design you see here. The breakthrough was a brand redesign I pursued but decided to discard and get at what I was really interested in: guilloché patterns. I’ve been interested in them for several years now — looking at money, diplomas and most recently on the labels for San Pellegrino. I’ve been wanting to work with them for a while now and at dinner in Key West one night was reminded as such when I ordered a bottle of it.
I took the label home and decided to do something with it. Originally I started with making the background of the site a guilloché pattern but found it distracting. It ended up on my Twitter account though.
I found that it’s beauty lies in the fact that from far away it becomes a mass of colour but upon close inspection reveals the complex patterns and close-up wonder. This was an effect I felt couldn’t be reproduced as a web background well, but which I integrated into the new logomark above. Upon close inspection you’ll see the light guilloché pattern.
I’m quite fond of texture but with a certain flatness to things — a mix of mid-century with a modern twist I suppose. And so I proceeded down that road to where we are now and what you see. Enough words. Take a look around and stay a while.
