Allchorn Design

Why the new design? Well, aside from the fact that the old one was feeling, well, old to me is that I have changed my role a bit. Not so far as throwing out my job title, but rather revising how I do things, who I do them for, and when.

Why Have I Changed Focus?

Those who know me will be aware that things have been relatively successful since I started Allchorn Design in Feb 2004, but things in the website design industry are taking a bit of a turn at the moment. Or so it seems.

With an influx of amateurs, and the increase in quality of themes and “cookie cutter” solutions these days, people seem to be losing sight of uniqueness and the preservation of their specific identity online. With services like Blogger, Wordpress.com, Hetzner’s Site Builder, Synthasite and the free website builders offered by some hosts, people are seemingly jumping on the band wagon and burning their fingers.

Something I’ve always remembered from when I was working in marketing and dealt with ad agencies is a saying that goes loosely as follows:

“Buying a bad designer a state of the art macintosh won’t make his designs any better.”

I believe the same rings true of these off the shelf offerings. If you bought me the most expensive guitar in the world, with a state of the art amplifier, I’d still reduce you to tears with my lack of musical skill. Set an aesthetically impaired individual free on a beautifully designed and crafted template, and you’ll have the web equivelant of my piece of music!

Well, this is why I’m shifting focus, but doesn’t tell you how. I’ve chosen to focus rather on smaller websites for small and medium sized companies and individuals. If a large company wants an elegant little website for some reason, sure thing. But indecisive committees, lengthy approval processes, and difficult “foodchain” communication is a thing of the past for me.

With the launch of Sitepress, I’m putting out an offer for anyone to afford a custom designed website integrated into a content management system and coded to perfection, according to web standards.

The New Look of Allchorn.com

Do you like it? Comment if you want. It’s a change for me and being a designer, I’m never “entirely” pleased with my own work. Especially the stuff I do for myself. It wasn’t a quick process. It’s something that has built up in my head, on paper and in little disposable mockup designs I’ve done in Fireworks over the last… well, ages!

The last leg of the final leap came from a desperate urge to get away from the Cutline theme created by Chris Pearson. Nice as it was, as I mentioned above, I don’t believe in using pre-made designs.

It All Started On Paper

I started the new design with my sketchbook, a 4B pencil and my little blue eraser that never seems to rub out. The same 3 things you can see at the bottom right of this page actually. As you can see, it pretty much mirrors the layout I have now on the site.

Sidebar On The Left

I chose a left to right layout with my sidebar on the left to serve as a quick glance of who I am and whats on offer in brief. Going down it shows some more info on what is on this site in the form of a category listing, and the tag cloud to see whats most popular.

Catering For 1024px Users And Above

The main content area I have made as wide as possible without having people moving their heads reading like they’re watching tennis from the middle of the court. The over all width of the site is 960px which accommodates 1024px resolution using visitors and above.

Scalability, Better Than I Could Have Imagined

The site scales beautifully! Even better than I expected. Try enlarging it and everything elegantly moves out the way for whatever is before it.

Light Colour Pallette And Little To No Frills

The most noticable aspect of the design is it’s simplicity and light colour pallette. This is to shift focus onto the content. There is a big fat chunky navigation at the top, so if you want to see my portfolio, or read my rambling “about” page, you can do so at your leisure, but the meat of the site is in the main, wide right hand column… throughout the site.

Putting Things Into Fireworks And Fleshing It Out

Working from my sketch, I created my master template visual in Fireworks. I prefer working with a more vector based program and I am most familiar using this awesome design package. It came out exactly as I wanted, and the clouds, birds and the subtle blue gradient from the top finished off the header of the page.

Working my way down, I used the thick bar on top of, and thinner underneath to quite clearly differentiate the headings for the sections in the sidebar. A trait of Cutline that I quite liked.

Finally, the footer. I took my pencil, sketchpad, eraser trio and photographed them with my 17-55mm lense really close up on a low f stop to give it a shallow depth of field, and managed to slot that into the bottom right hand corner of the design.

The latest posts and comments section in the screenshot of the design are still to be added at the time of writing this post.

Taking It From Design Comp. To A Wordpress Theme

Aaah, this is the part I truly enjoyed. It’s been a while since I got down and dirty with HTML and CSS. A touch of PHP was new to me, but it was all such basic stuff, I wouldn’t brag about it.

I followed Small Potato’s 16 step Wordpress theming tutorial which I did in one sitting. It took me about 5hrs and after it I feel I know a hell of a lot more than I did before about Wordpress. It also had me delving into the Wordpress codex shortly after to learn more about what the system can do.

Cutting images out of my design was simple. Just the logo, clouds, top gradient and the footer image were needed. Nothing complex, no strict measuring of bits and pieces. Just the valid XHTML accompanying a Stylesheet that tells everything where to be and how to look.

Typography, Keeping Things Simple

With the myriad of fonts available to use, why on earth would I stick to only two on my site? Well, Only one if you don’t count my logo which uses Trebuchet MS as an image. Thats right, only one font on this entire site; Arial.

The reasons for this are as follows:

1. Firstly, Arial is very easy to read on a screen. Usability studies have shown that Arial and Verdana are some of the most readable on-screen fonts.
2. I am a big fan of Helvetica (they even made a movie about the font), and Arial is Microsoft’s Helvetica, I thought I’d use something I prefer the look over most other type faces.
3. You are limited to the fonts you can use on a website, and Arial is one of the most widely installed fonts on computers. It’s been a standard font on Windows machines since 1992.

Well, thats about that… for now. I will add the other two blocks in under the posts soon, but there isn’t a desparate rush.