It’s been about 5 months since this site was redesigned. Not much has changed in my life since then. I’m still in University, I’m still enjoying my work placement at Star Perfumes in Salford — I am a little older though.

I redesigned again. Well, sorta. I “refocused” the home page of my site.

What I mean by “refocused” is a change in the main focus of my site. Up until today, the site has been primarily focused on my writing & my blog. Since I’ll be looking for work once I’ve finished my work placement and my final year in University, I want to draw the attention of the site’s visitors back to my work. And my face. My face is actually a pretty big part of it now.

This redesign also gave me an opportunity to play around with some new things. Stuff I’ve learnt over the last few month, as well as techniques I’ve read about but not had a chance to put into practice.

The biggest feature of the new home page is the showcase. Where my face is. If you keep the page open for a short while, you’ll see that my face zooms away to reveal additional content. Videos of a couple of my sites in action, as well as a little look at my business cards. I’m pretty proud of how they turned out.

Motion that moves

Here’s where I get a bit soppy. Design is a supremely integral part of everybody’s lives. The least we can do as designers is make the effort to produce high quality, easy-to-use, enjoyable products. And if you manage to create something that even resembles a shadow of that objective, it’s a pretty tall order to display it effectively in a static image. People use these things. With the advent of touch screen devices and computers, people are literally feeling these products through the screen. How can we show that?

I tried it with video, (HTML5 video rocks, by the way) and I think it worked quite well — but I’m not convinced it’s the best I can come up with.  We’ll see.

As usual, I couldn’t have done this without the criticism and help of my twitter followers and fellow dribbblers. Big thanks to them.

Onwards.