February 21, 2012 from abduzeedo's blog
Abduzeedo was created as a personal project. The main goal was to backup work while trying different things not only in the realm of graphic design but also experimenting with new trends in coding and stuff like that. Every year we try to refresh the site with a new design, however this time it took us a bit longer, but alas here it is.
It took us a little longer this time because last year we felt it wasn't exactly the right time nor necessary. The site was still performing well but with all the talk about responsive web design we saw an opportunity and a need to get on board with that.
As you can see there are quite a few changes not only in terms of visual design, but under the hood as well. We would like to point out 5 major changes:
- Color palette: After years of a colorful rainbow palette we decided to change. The idea was to create a super simple color palette while maintaining the dark background. So, to have a nice contrast we went with yellow, because there's no better contrast than black and yellow.
- Typography: We know that typography is the language in it's solid state. Web fonts are expanding with different options from Typekit, Google and many others. We decided to use Google Web fonts because it's super fast and reliable. Our font of choice was Armata.
- Responsive Design: Using HTML 5 Boilerplate and some Javascript files we made the site responsive for mobile, tablets and desktop. We are working on another version for larger resolutions. So stay tuned. A big thanks to WebdesignerWall for the amazing tutorials and tips.
- Family of Web sites: We used to keep everything in our Drupal CMS. Now we've launched 2 different sites : "UNEWZ" for user news and "RAWZ" for the daily inspiration submissions. Our goal is make the site even more open to users. Now everybody can submit images and write posts for the Abduzeedo community. We will use these Web sites to source quality content to be featured on the blog.
- Simple and big: you will notice that the home-page has less text. We hid the description text and made them visible only when you roll over the posts. We are also using bigger thumbs and bigger images in the articles. Abduzeedo is all about inspiration, and nothing like some big images to inspire us.
We still have so much to do, designing a web site is, I dare say, an endless project. But that is why it's so much fun. We learn so much and we of course make and will continue to make tons of mistakes. So bear with us. We will be improving this new design on a daily basis.
We hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your thoughts with us
