Obligatory Redesign Post

Redesigning my personal site has always been difficult for me. I’ve lacked a direction for the design and had a hard time finding my voice. In the past I’ve escaped this by by having almost nothing but type. This year I set a goal for myself to write frequently and focus the design towards that goal. Communication is a big part of my job now and I desperately need the practice for written communication. Yet there has been nothing but crickets since.

I’m a designer so of course I need to redesign my site in order to write on it…right? I started this iteration of my site design over the summer with that in mind. It never got to a place that I loved and slowly lost interest because of it.

I picked it back up in the fall and after much slow iteration I think that I’m finally in a spot that I feel confident in. The core of the redesign centers around my writing, since that was the goal. It fully commits me to write. If I don’t this design and site will become stagnant quick. I’m hoping that that forces me keep writing consistently.

The redesign, again, relies heavily on type. Specifically FF Meta Serif. I loved how the black weight of the serif came across. Stocky, reliable but with a little bit of style. It’s weight allows for me to create an easy hierarchy with the type. For the body copy I rely on system font stack. I want people to read in the typeface that they are most accustomed to. This choice also keeps the page weight smaller.

I didn’t want to rely on any fancy animations or page transitions. A result of both my time and skillset but also to harken back to a time where building a personal blog was a bit more simple. These choices are meant to put more emphasis on content and not the design around the content.

Accompanying each new post is an illustration that represents the content. This gives me a constrained small problem to solve, makes writing a little more fun, and affords me some space to add personality to the site. It is a small piece that is meant to reference back to my art directed blog posts of long ago. Just as I’ve been wanting to get back into writing more, I’ve also wanted to push myself back into drawing. Drawing has been a form of meditation for me over the years and something that I try to build into a habit as well. I’m excited to hop back into sketching and sketching with a purpose.

While I still don’t think I’ve really hit the mark with the design, I’m happy with where it’s headed. I think it gives me enough of a platform to start writing and leaves some room for improvements along the way.