Blog redesign romanzenner.com
A couple of weeks ago, my buddy Ro asked me to redesign his Blog. Up to now he used a modified free Wordpress theme that served the purpose. But he wanted an individual theme with more personality and less unnecessary sidebar stuff und clutter filling up the page.
The logo
Roman also wanted a figurative mark and not only a word mark for his personal brand, so I started off with creating a simple figure, containing his initials “r” and “z”, which together form an uppercase “R”.
The layout
Then I went on with the website. All I had were some photos from Roman and an uncompleted color scheme idea. The site should be uncluttered, reduced to the necessary things, yet interesting and with a personal touch and shouldn’t by any means look like those business sites.
The basic layout contains two columns, very clean and simple. To get it more interesting and objective I chose the paper metaphor. I changed it on every page to diversify the layout, choosing a pile of paper for the blog section, a bit of a newspaper-look for publications, put in some dog-ear here and there and so on. All in all without destroying the clean look.
Typography
To support the casual look I searched for a fitting font on Typekit, where I found Ronnia, a friendly humanist sans serif by the great guys of typetogether. Currently this font is only viewable on the Mac, PC’s falls back to the more neutral Arial. Depending on future website statistics we consider to use Ronnia also for Windows.
The code
Although there is quite an amount of IE users, Roman had no problem moving forward with the source, so I was able to use HTML5 and some CSS3 here and there. Evereything in Safari and Firefox both on Mac and Windows went well, the only problem – as always – is the Internet Explorer. Here we decided to only support the latest version, IE 8. Versions 6 and 7 get the Universal IE stylesheet by Andy Clarke.
Conclusion
So, a couple of weeks and some all-nighters later , the new website of Roman is finally online. Do you like it? Let me know!
Michael Steinmann wrote 554 days ago · #
Great work!
Matthias Balke wrote 554 days ago · #
Wow that’s an awsome design, now I know who to ask in case I want a professional look for my website!
Tanner Christensen wrote 554 days ago · #
Nice work. However, it looks like there’s a bug with the search box…it has a darker background then the rest of the website.
Christoph Zillgens wrote 553 days ago · #
Thanks for your comments, guys!
@Tanner: Yes, the search box is indeed darker, but it’s not a bug, it’s a feature :-).
Nick Weisser wrote 541 days ago · #
I’m very impressed! This is web 2.0 design at its best!
webee blog wrote 519 days ago · #
gratz – you have made a really nice layout :)
greetings from the UK
Shop Freelancer wrote 390 days ago · #
One word: awesome. The idea with the huge photo on the start page is brilliant as well as the really clean and structured layout. This is really a good job, and I mean it!
Sagar Ranpise wrote 362 days ago · #
The site looks really clean and elegant. All details are really cool and I even noticed contact us address in CSS3 Style.