The Blog Studio

Oh man. This was a fun project. First, Jeff, the client, writes very well about wine and all things vine related. Second, he gave me pretty much full creative reign on the design. His only direction was “make it look like a poster for a rock show”. Ummm…. OK!

This design marks a real departure from much of the work you see in our portfolio. It’s a return to a style of design I love: grungy, experimental, fun. It takes a very brave client to let a designer go wild like this, so a great big thank you to Jeff from all of us. 

Jeff has also taken advantage of our new service packs, so the site will continue to evolve as we get user feedback and launch new services.

Here are a couple of screenshots to get you started.

We’re really excited to announce the launch of artsncraftsblog.com. This has been a fun project from start to finish.

Crafters are amazing people. They’re an incredibly supportive bunch. Super creative, and super friendly. The purpose for artsncraftsblog.com is three-fold:

1. to offer original content, including how-to’s, stories, and general blogo-ephemera (hey, I just invented a new term)


2. to point to the best content out there on the web, including upcoming events


3. to become a community for like minded individuals to share and support each other

The visual aspects of the site design seek to echo the whimsy and experimentation crafters bring to their art. We’ve combined softer frills and flourishes with hard corners and geometric shapes to create a platform that’s designed to encourage having fun. There’s a raucous mix of type and colours at play here. Come on in and play!

The world of trading is complex. The world of option trading is doubly so. Pete Stolcers is a very smart, very honest fellow who’s made his name consistently trading successfully on the options market. His blog, 1option.com is a vast resource for the serious trader. Pete gives away more information and data than many sites charge a fortune for. If you’re into this fascinating world, you owe it to yourself to check his new site out.

As is fitting for a site of this nature, the visual ornamentation is kept to an absolute minimum. What you get here is the straight facts, with a minimum of distraction. We’re really proud that Pete chose The Blog Studio to be his partner on this site.

Wow. Welcome to The Blog Studio version 5, aka Woody. Eight hours from photoshop file to working site. I’m sure there are frayed bits showing here or there, but I really wanted to get this site up for the CSSReboot.

A few quick notes before I collapse.

This site is the result of all the work I documented in the redesign process (I’ll link to it in the morning – have to fix a couple of things first!). I finally got the insights I needed to design a site I’ll be able to live with for more than a few weeks.

To that end, I’ve designed this thing to be easy to update. There are several key branding items that are constant (for example the reversed headline text, the typeface, the layout), but the graphics will change according to the seasons.

The theme here is obviously fall. The leaves you see are from my backyard, the wood from a couple of old projects. I intend to change the graphics up pretty frequently. My self-imposed rule is to use real objects that I find and scan, with only minimal tweaking.

I’ve ditched the javascript effects in favor of simple and fast. While I received a ton of positive feedback on the last design (?!?), I got pretty tired of ALL the showing and hiding going on. Don’t get me wrong, I think that as a UI device, hiding and showing elements on a page is very useful. But the last version of the site went way overboard in their use.

Finally, comments. I’ve turned commenting off for the moment. We’ve been getting slammed by comment spam recently, and I’m just tired of it. This design includes a really lovely comment treatment, so I will be turning them back on once this current spam wave subsides.

That’s it! If you find a bug, would you be so kind as to drop me a note at peter at theblogstudio.com? Thanks!

The design for The Blog Studio is finally done, and I’m actually happy with my own work (this may be a first). Here are a few sneak peeks. We hope to have the site up within the week. Sleep? Who needs it.