About This Redesign…
It’s no secret that I’m almost impossible to please. The majority of my posts are eviscerating others when they don’t adhere to what I consider to be an acceptable standard. That’s just What I Do™.
With that in mind, it would take someone incredibly stupid, or incredibly confident, to voluntarily accept my ludicrously specific design brief and take on the project of redesigning this site.
In spite of my best efforts to put him off,1 someone did take on the project, and his name is David Krauser.
And he didn’t just take on the project: he nailed it. He was a consummate professional throughout the whole process,2 and didn’t once tell me an idea was stupid or bad; instead, he implemented them from my the crappy mock-ups I knocked together in MS Paint, and he made them work.
Any Shoop-powered idiot can work to a client’s specifications and demands, however demented or tasteless, but it takes a really, really good designer to work to instructions whilst simultaneously making them work.
David Krause is one such designer: fantastic at what he does, not afraid to take risks, and unbelievably easy to work with. All of that, and the job he did on my site, is why I can’t recommend him highly enough.
-
To quote directly from my opening email:
[T]he brief would be as follows:
- The colour scheme should be the same, or very similar to, the existing one;
- The lime colour is non-negotiable (the fact it’s my favourite colour ably demonstrates how little taste I have);
- It has to be completely Flash-free;
- It has to be fast;
- Ideally, it would be useable by those with poorer vision;
- Plenty of whitespace;
- Definitely not “Web 2.0ish”.
-
He was even graceful in the face of increasingly arbitrary demands; when I asked for the design to use “as few images as possible … and minimal/no JavaScript”, he just went ahead and did it. ↩
Notes
-
stevekinney liked this
-
ibsimpson reblogged this from koralatov and added:
Beautiful redesign Koralatov. It really...pleasure visiting your site to read your...
-
ibsimpson liked this
-
koralatov posted this
