Divensis

Like most designers, there's always a gap between my current portfolio and my vision of what it can be. A while back, when this gap grew too big, I gathered the crew and set out for a redesign. This is what happened.

Posted February 26 in Case Study

New blog

How can the front page offer returning visitors the latest shiz, while still presenting the most important projects & headlines to first-timers? This was the main question that needed to be answered in order for this redesign to succeed.

A blog seemed smart, but not on behalf of the featured projects.

After some heavy wireframing and serious head-scratching, I came up with this: A two-panel blog that includes both articles and projects, with a featured, double-sized item on top. The featured item may be an article, a news story or a project, and is not dependent on time in any way. I believe this solution makes a good combination between the latest and the greatest.

Several new designs

One of the things that bothered me on the previous version was how the design of the site itself had a tendency to compete with the projects. On this version, every project and blog post is allowed to have its own tailored look. So while the overall navigation and layout stays the same, the visual flavor on each page may change completely – like snowy mountains on Oppdag Troms or rough camo on Kampklar.

To make this happen, the backend allows for custom css on every page. I'm aware that we're not making it easy for ourselves with this feature, but I'm pretty sure it's gonna pay off in the long run.

New backend

While the visual treats came along nicely, big things were happening under the hood. Håvard & Torkil got their hands dirty with Django, and developed a solid backend that allows us to tailor every detail of the site in a simple fashion. Although this isn't visible to the public eye, it might just be the biggest upgrade on the site.

The days of hacking around Wordpress is definitely over.

Among other things that were changed was the textures, the typography and the colour scheme, which is now a bit brighter overall. Thanks for the patience while we slipped into something a bit more comfortable. Now let's see how long we can stick with this one :)