I’ve been kicking around the idea of a refresh/realign of my site since I started working on thingsthatarebrown full-time. It’s been over eight months of “hunt and peck” web design and development — design ideas hatched, then discarded, picked back up again, then left in the dirty clothes pile, only to be put back on because there was nothing clean to wear.
After a lot of piecemeal iteration, I finally arrived at a visual language I could live with, one that shows what thingsthatarebrown is all about.
1+1 = 3
Now that I’m working with the wonderful Tiffani Jones (soon to be Tiff Jones Brown), the goals, abilities and positioning of my agency change considerably. Gone are the days of just being ‘a solid freelance designer’ — today we’re a bona fide agency, with serious combined talents and a decidedly collaborative approach to web design. I’m more excited for the future than I’ve ever been — ain’t no mountain high enough… and all that.
So really, what we most needed was a site with Tiffani’s name on it, as well as one that showed over a full year’s worth of my best design work (the old site was painfully out of date). It also needed to scale in order to fit some very exciting projects that we’ll post in the coming months.
More than anything, the new site is really just an evolution of my brand, clarification of my message, and a stronger showcasing of my work — as Cameron Moll said smartly, “good designers redesign, great designers realign.” The brown birdy has grown up nicely. It’s powered by my eternal frenemy, Wordpress, and it’s both a flexible design and platform to keep up with my rapidly growing company.
Hope y’all like it.
14 Comments
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Congrats! It looks great, but more importantly, it’s up and out there. I think I can remember three distinct conversations about the various design starts you had with it. Well done sir.
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Looks great Matt, well done.
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Looks great! Well done.
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@Grant, @Geoffrey, and @Tom: Thanks guys! Feels pretty nice to have it off my mind (for now).
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Looks solid, Matt! Glad to finally see it out in the wild. Here’s hoping it helps bring you continued success.
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Very professional and still BROWN. Looks Good! The wire-like texture in the background is a nice detail. I imagine prospective clients will be impressed as well.
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Nice! I love the colors…well done!
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The worst critic is yourself, right?!
The new design is awesome. Congrats on the successful redesign of your site!
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New site looks great, job well done! It’s got some great visual flow.
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Also, love that you’re using the 960.gs — I’m a big fan.
Quick design question: As a fellow WordPress user, I am always struggling with having a blog be a separate install or keep it as part of the main site. Your blog, here, is it part of your new site’s build? Why, or why not?
Thanks. And again, looks awesome.
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@Everyone: Thanks for all the great comments! — really appreciate all the feedback.
@Jeff Mackey: I struggle with that choice too. For this project, they’re separate installs (the blog is just in the /blog/ subdirectory).
There’s a trade-off in more maintenance to keep them both up-to-date, but the upside is that it’s super easy to maintain different looks/themes, keep the databases independent of each other, and develop easily both sites without worry of affecting or mistakenly removing data.
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Nice work dude!
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Hooray! And I’m stoked that my website made your example screenshot.
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Great stuff man! Nice to see the site evolve after reading about the changes happening over the last little while…