We love to start the new year with a redesign, and this year we’re not going to disappoint.
Visitors will doubtlessly have noticed that we have a brand new, partly-finished website up. No, it’s not ideal. Yes, we’d love to show you a fully-finished, feature-complete site.
Heck, we’d love it if the page you were reading right now was using the grid structure we sketched out, but we’re not quite there yet!
Tell you what: we were seriously fed up with the old one. It was based on a template of questionable quality… goodbye to that. Most importantly, it didn’t show our nice new look, featuring a logo designed by our friends at Factory North, and we didn’t have a good way of showing all the nice things our clients have to say about working with (the five of) us.
What you see now is something we built from scratch in a very hectic two weeks, narrowing in day by day on the look we’d be happy with.
It was a process, and everyone contributed. I came up with initial ideas, Corinna mocked them up in Photoshop, I tweaked and came up with a custom style for illustration, Dan built out all the pages in a responsive and mobile-friendly framework, and Kandace guided the design of the home page hero banners.
You can thank Mercury Script for making those banners look so awesome. We had our eyes on it for days, and finally decided we just had to figure out how to fit it in!
We’ll be writing more in the weeks to come. For now, the plan is to set aside a bit of time every month—perhaps a day or two—for the team to iterate. We plan on keeping a stack of tasks in Trello or Basecamp, and then just parsing out a little bit to tackle in one of our sprints. By the end of the year, we hope to have a true gem, and it’s exciting to have something to work toward.
I’ll tell you what: it’s also nice to have something new, and to be rid of a site we felt didn’t show us in the right light!
Here’s to a fabulous 2013 and applying a little kaizen to our website.
