I’m moving

I’m still working on a redesign of my portfolio site (although I’m probably starting from scratch — again), but I’m going to be sharing my stories at my portfolio site: http://cjohnson.us/content/blog/

If you’re reading this through an RSS reader, go ahead and subscribe to my new feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/chrisjohnson

Thanks!

Who’s inspiring me now

Now that I have the homepage content more or less worked out (see the last two posts) it’s time to start generating sketches for the design direction of the site.

But before I do that, I wanted to mention two enormous sources of inspiration for me.

Homepage content, Part II

With the advice of Leon Paternoster and Andrea, I’ve made a few changes to the homepage copy I presented last week.

Homepage content

Too often in the past I’ve found myself designing blind. That is, trying to come up with a look and feel for a website or print piece without the content. I’ve cursed clients that asked me to just mock something up, without even providing a title.

Unfortunately, I tend to do the same thing to myself when I’ve worked on my own projects. I think that ultimately my designs have suffered from having to shoehorn content into a design I’m already wedded to. 

For my new website, I’m going to try to work with actual content for a few pages (the homepage and a blog post page at the very least) while I come up with the design.

First things first: Site architecture

So take me away, I don’t mind
But you better promise me, I’ll be back in time
Gotta get back in time – Huey Lewis and the News

Before I begin any visual work on a new site, I usually work with the client to come up with a site map for at least the primary and secondary pages

My new logo…

… until I decide to change it:

'CJ' in a slightly modified Helvetica Bold Italic

Logo options

Here are the results of a few hours dedicated to coming up with logo ideas:

I need a logo

When I was a teenager, I would often start a website design by placing the client’s logo on blank canvas in Photoshop. You can draw a lot of ideas from a logo. It can inform your choice of type and color depending on the logo.

Maybe that wasn’t the best way to go about designing – these days, I usually start with rough pencil sketches and I’ll simply mark the placement of the logo by writing ‘logo’ – but I think having a logo will help me design my portfolio website.

What this site is about

Hey there.

I’m Chris Johnson, a designer and web developer. I’m starting this blog to chronicle the redesign of my personal portfolio website.