I recently finished up a design for Brad Isaac’s blog called Achieve-IT! It was a fun project to work on and Brad has some great posts at his site, so doing the “research” was pretty fun.
Brad wanted a traditional blog that was “spiced up” a bit. I like taking traditional blog layouts and trying to make them unique. It’s a bit of a challenge to make a standard blog design stand out from the free templates.
The end result is something I am happy with and I am pretty sure Brad likes it. It’s nothing mind blowing as far as information architecture goes, and it certainly isn’t “cutting edge” as far as graphics are concerned, but it’s very clean (no AdSense!), it’s simple, and it brings focus to Brad’s content.
Brad also wanted to include a few links and images that would help promote his goal software so I added an “advertisement” for his software and included a link in the blog’s main navigation to his goal software’s site.
I’m happy with the design, I think the logo works well with the theme of the site, and I like the way it turned out. We are still tying up a few loose ends, but the site is mostly finished - check it out and read some of Brad’s content, it’s good stuff.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Looks great! Very simple, very Ben. ;-)
Ben, I love it.
I was doing some odds and ends yesterday, posting and stuff and it was “refreshing” to be working in the new environment - if that makes any sense. :)
The template looks really nice. There is something odd going on with the header image (http://www.persistenceunlimited.com/wp-content/themes/achieve/images/logo.gif) though, the antialiasing on the text feels a bit hard.
Other than that, great work!
Lode, please explain. I’m not such a visual guy, so what you say is difficult for me to see.
Brad, perhaps I explained myself a bit unclear.
What I meant is shown in this picture:
http://www.linu.cx/log/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/achieveitlogo.png
notice how the bottom one is much smoother. Compare the borders of A, c, e and v for example.
The letter borders of the original are much more pixelated.
(The font size is not exactly the same as the original, but that’s not the point.)
this blog rocks