Concrete Wind Blog

The new version of my website is live and ready to use. I redesigned the site using the 960 grid system, jQuery and php.

small screenshot of the new concrete wind home page

I redesigned the site for several reasons. To start, I am a different and more skilled designer than I was when I created the last version. It lacked proper contrast, needed more content, and I have a lot more tricks up my sleeve these days. Second, I have completed a lot of projects since my days at Jaman and none of them were in my portfolio. I had to make the decision to either update my portfolio and let clients interact with an interface that was not reflective of my current skills OR bite the mullet lie Joe Dirt and redesign the site from the ground up with good design and data architecture in mind.

After several sketches and some photoshop experiments, I had a good idea of the colors and shapes I wanted to use. My previous design had some good elements (city skylines, trees, faint sunburst) that I wanted to keep but they needed to mature and have some warmth. I took my old photoshop files from the previous design and cleaned up the layers so that I could see the bare essentials. Here’s what the site looked like:

screenshot of the previous version of concrete wind

Then I dug up an old screen background that I designed about a year and a half ago:

sunburst screen background

I combined the two files and added some extra polish that I learned from a fantastic design tutorial by Alvaro Guzman . The end result is the website you see today. I’ll write more about the streamlined architecture and jQuery effects I used in a later post.