The Whitehawk

Note: Even though I didn’t post a Design Journal yesterday, I did work on the website, therefore today there will probably be two Design Journals. Lucky you

As irrelevant as it may seem, yesterday I found out that the most important thing about designing a personal website could very well be choosing a name for it, and in the next paragraphs I’ll explain why.

I am a critic at heart. I like to think that all of us are, even if only a little bit. I find it very easy to criticize a blog, and at the same time give helpful advice that will help improve it. In InforQuali, my former job, that “skill” of mine was very appreciated, and all of the projects I worked on were successful in meeting their deadlines and in pleasing the customers (which was sometimes a hard thing to do).

Even though I didn’t realize it then, all of the design projects I worked on were given a name, or at least a concept. And even this site’s current design has a concept behind it, even though I never realized it before.

When I made the first design for thewhitehawk.net (back then the .com wasn’t available), I wanted to make a design that was an homage to Macromedia’s old website, which has “recently” been butchered (in my humble opinion) by Adobe. That meant it would have a title, a horizontal menu, and 3 columns.

Besides having a concept, I already had a layout, two of the most difficult tasks in making a website were already done, before I even opened Fireworks or drew anything.

When it came to designing version 2.0, I wanted to do something completely fresh. I wanted to make something that followed set forth by some, or most, of 9rules’ blogs, while maintaining a style of it’s own. There were some characteristics I wanted to have, and things that I wanted to drastically improve from this version.

To do that, I tried to disconnect myself from this site’s current design, as it’s creator, and look at is a critic, as I tried to when I did version 1.5, which is what you currently see. I came up with different things I wanted the new design to have:

1. Whitespace - something that this design really needs is Whitespace. In version 1.5 things improved a bit in that aspect, but not enough.
2. Less useless links - no one, except myself, has ever used the archive. Specially since there is “search” box on top of it.
3. Less segmented link list - there are many more aspects like this one that I want to cleanup
4. Screenshot-friendly design - If I want to write an Anime and Manga blog I need to have good image integration with the site

I also wanted to keep some visual elements from the last website, like the hawk’s head, which grew from a 50×50 pixels black & white gif, to a vector image which can be used in an infinite number of ways.

So what did I do from there? Well, obviously I opened up Fireworks and started drawing away, and let my imagination carry me. If version 1.0, or 1.5 had a name, it would definitely be “birdcage”. Everything is wrapped around a border, so I wanted version 2.0 to be the oposite of that. That is why the first, and main, element of the new design is the hawk’s head breaking away from a line. And everything underneath it, will supposedly be “free”.

I intend on minizing the use of borders, give the site the “air” it needs for people to enjoy reading it’s content. But is that enough to drive me through the whole design? Of course not.

I though that trying to design a site from top to bottom, and just create things as I come across them would be easy, and I was terribly wrong. So let me spread the message:

Do not try to design a website with separate elements.

You need to design it as a whole. When a child is growing, it doesn’t get a right leg first and a left leg second. A site shouldn’t grow any differently from that. Let’s look at a good example of that: Avalonstar.

When you visit it right now you might think to yourself: “There are empty fields there, the design feels rushed and tasteless. I beg to differ. Well, it may have been a little rushed, but it was made with a future in mind. It already has space and structure reserved for future growth.

One of the worst mistakes made in any project is when the project outgrows it’s original concept. Instead of constraining it’s site, Bryan already thought about where he wanted to go with the site and left room for it to grow.

The current design wasn’t made for an anime blog. It wasn’t made thinking it would join the ranks of 9rules (speaking of which, the logo has misteriously disapeared from all of the blog pages, need to fix that).

Version 2.0 will be Anime and content friendly. It won’t look as “corporate” as it currently does, but hopefully it will look more “me”, and hopefully my content will also improve with it.

That is why Version 2.0 will be called “Reflexion”. Even though it doesn’t feel very new, and some people have pointed out that it’s very (or too much Web 2.0′ish), the blog’s title was the second visual element I liked the most out of the header. And since I’ve given the site a name, I’ve already overcome some of the “blocks” I had before, but you’ll read more about that in the afternoon

Griffith Design