Zee's redesign

abduzeedo - 10/18/2007

After some weeks planning, designing and developing, the Zee's new website is online. Much more than simply a redesign, we have changed everything, mainly because we needed to use a good and scalable CMS and create a blog for the company.

Zee's old site screens
Zee's old site

With all these requirements, Drupal became our only choice. Firstly because we've been using it for a while so it wouldn't take us too much time learning and developing for it, giving us more time to spend on the design matters.

Our goal for the site was basically create a very simple interface using few images and put all of our efforts on typography, colors and CSS.

Listed below some sites and blogs inspired us.

References of sites

We also followed some ideas we learned from some excellent podcasts such as the @media presentations: How to be a Creative Sponge, Diabolical Design: The Devil is in the Details, Five Simple Steps to Better Typography and Interface Design Juggling.

Among all of those lessons, we were able to apply on this project the very useful Jason Santa Maria's tip of creating a sort of wireframe, but with the real content, where we could play with the typography elements without worrying about colors and images.

With the site well structured we started applying some colors and testing different combinations.

Wireframe and first color scheme
Wireframe and first color scheme

Although our first idea was to use a light background, we chose to keep it dark. That decision is explained because we have always used dark backgrounds, and wouldn't be a wise move to change our identity so drastically. Visit the site at http://zee.com.br

Screens of the final version of the layout
Final Version

About author

User picture

My name is Fabio Sasso, I'm a graphic/web designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil and I'm the founder of Abduzeedo. I hope we can share lots of information, tips, and ideas through abduzeedo.

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I wish i can learn to be as stylish and artistic as you. But then artistic skills are inborn.

Anonima's picture
Anonima (not verified) 03/04/2008

U people have got a cool site in here.. and a nice contrasting shades.! (I dint know tht black can create this much wonders)

Vishnu's picture
Vishnu (not verified) 12/10/2007

Great job! The site looks very nice. :) I especially like the colors and typography.
The site seems to function very good too.

Mickel's picture
Mickel (not verified) 10/25/2007

Parabéns, o Redesign ficou demais!
E outra esses sites inspirados, são favoritos meus também.
Além de utilizar o Coda, acho ele o melhor editor html e para CSS uso o CSSEdit.
Abraço

Felipe Spina's picture
Felipe Spina (not verified) 10/22/2007

Well done .Nice works with drupal

Benny's picture
Benny (not verified) 10/18/2007

Definitely this new version seems better, looks more professional, more minimalistic, great choose of colors, although i still think that it can be improved... congrats!!!

blackbelt's picture
blackbelt (not verified) 10/18/2007

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