Over the past few weeks I’ve been adding features, shifting servers and generally just getting T Incorporated into top shape. I’m glad I went ahead and launched but I found it a bit frustrating that I’ve been spending my time working on T Incorporated and not writing. So, now that things have finally settled down a bit (I’m not rebooting my server every 10 minutes anymore) I’d like to talk a bit about some of the design decisions that went into T Incorporated.
First, the goals:
I wanted to incorporate all of the stuff I do online. Well, at least almost all of it. I upload photos to Flickr, post my status to Twitter, create links in del.icio.us, write blog posts, etc. and I wanted to get them in one location, but in a structured way.
I wanted the site to be at least somewhat lasting. I tend to get in the habit of wanting to redesign my personal site often and I wanted to try and find a way to keep from doing that.
I wanted the site to be flexible. I often change my mind or think up new ideas and I didn’t want to have to redesign the site every time I thought of something.
I wanted the site to be representative of me.
How I went about solving them:
I don’t want to get into the technical details, but, by working at Blue Flavor, I’ve been lucky to sit next to and become good friends with Jeff Croft. He was working on a new version of his own site and I started to see the power of it so started to help out myself. Being able to pull in all my various data sources into a new structured database has given me a ton of flexibility in how I present the content which was really what I was hoping for. In short it helped make my design ideas a reality.
To try and get that lasting appeal I went for classic with a hint of modern. As you can tell the site is fairly straight forward, crisp, clean, a bit professional feeling and a touch “newspapery”. It’s content heavy so my goal was to borrow a lot from newspapers, rely heavily on a strong grid, careful amounts of whitespace, and type to bring out the content. I couldn’t get far away from using Helvetica but I varied the size, color, and capitalization to try and emphasize different ares of the pages. I also wanted my photos to be shown more prominently than my last personal site incarnations. So, now they’re bigger on each detail page and there are 6 different shots directly on the homepage and 5 which have a different background and horizontal grid to call them out even more.
Yes, I wanted the site to be flexible, and the back-end provided the means, but I wanted the design to be able to accommodate that goal. As you can tell from my content pages there are quite a few different grids going on, and that’s intentional. I wanted to be sure and not just design a nice looking home page but that all the different content pages were designed to best represent that content. The navigation is horizontal to take up minimal space as is the footer. This way I can limit any administrative debris for any new page types. I plan on creating a few section pages in the future that might include photos, blog post, links, and a map or two say for a vacation and this layout allows me to do that. It also has the added benefit of letting me keep designing without having to redesign the whole thing.
This design represents me best when compared to any of my previous designs. I’ve spent many years, emulating others, stealing a technique here or a style there and while I always created my own new design, I’ve spent countless hours trying to make sure it didn’t look like anyone else’s. And that’s where I went wrong. If I’ve learned anything about design it’s that while you want to constantly push yourself, you also need to make sure you’re being true to yourself. I made this design be about what I like, what I think works and to represent me. I stopped worrying if it looked like someone else’s. It’s not the first to use black, white, red, and Helvetica—instead I just focused on making it good. I find designing a personal site incredibly challenging (you’re always your harshest critic), but following the “just make it good and like you” mantra worked well for me. I recommend it to anyone if you’re struggling to design your own site.
There’s plenty more to talk about, things like my love for Gotham (my chosen identity typeface) or my new locations section, man, I do love maps, and the inspiration for my stream page but I’ve already rattled on. I’ll save that for another post. For now, I’m just glad it’s done, up, and most of the polish has been applied.