semiBad

the next generation

Has it really been over a month since my last little flurry of posts? I make a terrible blogger. To be honest, at least I've got a decent reason this time — I've had a whole bunch of great freelance projects that have occupied approximately 92% of my waking time (the other 8% was G&Ts in the sun, and why the hell not).

Anyway, I thought it was probably about time to clean this place up a little bit, and a suspiciously free day earlier this week sealed the deal. I always liked the simplicity of <em>semiBad</em>'s first design, and really wanted to build on that with the redesign.

The visual style is an extension of a little project I did for the new Beatcheck podcast (no link to the site, as it's a private area for the podcast admin). I've been experimenting a lot recently with very simple typography — trying to build pleasing, readable hierarchies of information without varying text size is one of the things that's come out of that.

Although the layout is fundamentally different from the previous version, it was built completely around the existing content. I wanted the content to move seamlessly across to the new layout, to the point where aside from a couple of napkin-grade sketches, I designed the entire layout in the browser with the real database providing the content. It's not a technique I'd use for every project, but in this case it certainly helped greatly with the rapid turnaround and launch.

Anyway, I'm not sure a redesign this simple really needs any more explanation. Let me know what you reckon, in the comments or by email. I'll be writing up some of my recently completed projects later, and there's still some more general stuff that I've been meaning to blog for ages. Set your feed readers accordingly!