A little more about the redesign // Blog // greg-wood.co.uk

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A little more about the redesign

Designing a website for yourself is a hard thing to do. When I started designing this site I had a hundred different ideas that I wanted to implement. I wanted to reference this era of design, a bit of that one, and maybe use these photos and this typeface, etc. Seeing as I've reached a design that I'm pretty happy with, I thought I'd talk a bit about two of the main directions I took.

Die Neue Graphik

Since I got into typography and subsequently grids about a year ago, I’ve been a massive fan of the Swiss style of graphic design. I love the way designers were able to take the most basic (yet arguably fundamental) design elements such type, whitespace, colour and shape to create original, beautiful compositions. Texture was rarely used, and if so it was sparsely, and the use of illustration or photography only added more depth to the pages.

For this site, this Swiss style battled it out with a gothicy-serify style for about a month, sometimes combining into some nasty hybrid

For this site, this Swiss style battled it out with a gothicy-serify style for about a month, sometimes combining into some nasty hybrid, but the Swiss came out on top, as you can probably see. Aside from the body copy which is nasty Arial due to the way PCs render fonts, all the type is set in some form of the classic typeface Helvetica (apart from a few cheeky swigs of italicised Georgia). The use of a horizontal grid is obvious, whitespace is abundant and black rectangles have been used to balance the pages out from left to right.

Doodling

I’m half an organised person. Where one half of me loves order and hierarchy, the other half of me is all over the place. I forget my keys after planning a massive, multi-train journey across the country. I doodle like a mentalist when in meetings about process and conventions. When thinking about how to balance out my ordered, rigid Swiss-y design with something resembling this seemingly dead half of my brain, I stopped and looked down at what my bic had been doing. I believe my exact thought was “What the fuck is that?”

Greg's doodles

After censoring and dumbing down some of the doodles so they were less insane, the characters seemed to fit rather nicely into the design. I do plan on cranking some more out soon, and maybe some themed ones for seasonal entertainment.

There are more elements that have been worked into the design, but that kinda sums up the main two directions for now. I will continue to blog about bits and pieces, maybe do some CSS related stuff soon, but for now a great idea for a design I’m working on at work has just popped into my head. Must dash.