Second and Park Redesign: Low-tech, Offline, Collaborative

July 14, 2009 — Tiffani— 6 comments

When you run your own business, taking time to experiment with your design process can be really challenging. But with the redesign of my web writing business site, Second and Park (Don’t freak; the new one isn’t up yet!), we really wanted to have fun and tinker with our normal way of doing things.

crafty

Look and Feel
For the look and feel of the site, we took inspiration from eclectic sources: The wallpaper behind the bar at
Cafe Presse, the typewriting on the side of a bag of coffee, a beautiful blue-green colored door on a subway, a rainier cherry, articles from The Atlantic, and an old photo book.

Writing
As far as the actual writing was concerned, we wanted something very straightforward and as easy to make sense of as a menu board — but less formulaic. We also wanted the copy to be fun, without obscuring our main message (“I do web writing, mostly for design agencies”), one that is surprisingly difficult to communicate since a lot of folks don’t know what web copy is.

No-Computer Tuesday
We stepped away from the computer a number of times throughout the process, using sheets of paper and cut-out chunks of text to experiment with the placement of words on the page. Oddly, this lead to more than just a better layout — it actually helped us focus our overall strategy and generate better branding concepts.

snp-big

Collaboration
One of the best things about having two people working at thingsthatarebrown is that we now have all sorts of opportunities to collaborate and inspire one another’s ideas about design, copywriting, and business. For the Second and Park redesign, collaboration was key, with each of us filling in the blanks for the other.

The re-vamped Second and Park hasn’t yet replaced the current landing page — but it will soon. Stay tuned.

* And one more thing: we should mention two great articles about content and design that we kept in the back of our minds in the course of this work — one by 37Signals and one
from A List Apart. Essentials, both of ‘em.

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6 Comments

  1. July 14, 2009 2:59 pm
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    Tease! Show the goods!

  2. July 14, 2009 3:01 pm
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    Can’t wait to see it! The thumbnail is a nice teaser but I’m looking forward to checking it out the real deal after reading about your approach.

  3. July 14, 2009 3:06 pm
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    Brown: get on the horse! Everyone else: we’ll hurry!

  4. July 14, 2009 4:23 pm
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    That looks great! Can’t wait to see it.

  5. July 14, 2009 5:36 pm
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    Pssh. This is like Google announcing their OS ahead of time.

    Stupid Google.

  6. July 19, 2009 3:48 am
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    I like where this is going (and I hope it’s going to the Interwebs soon) ;)

    Kenny: I agree, stupid Google indeed.


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