We’ve recently had the pleasure once again of working with Collis Ta’eed and the team at Envato, a company we admire – and one full of creative & down to earth guys – running a very successful network of sites. Having them use your icons on their site(s) is one thing, but working with them is a true honor.
Here’s our write up of our involvement in the recent re-design, our thoughts on it – and our early design drafts for Collis.
A look at the new Envato Marketplaces
There’s a lot of people to please when you’re re-designing such a huge network of sites, and a lot of pressure on the team behind it, it calls for some creative thinking and a fresh look at things. The first time I saw a near finished Envato Marketplaces re-design I knew right away that I was looking at something that people were going to love, and I think that’s probably a big hurdle when you’re making a big change to something people are used to.
Anyway, here’s some screenshots for you to gawp at first!
What Work Did We Do?
Well, we’re going to show you some of our early mock-ups that we sent to Collis months ago. Now I must explain, you’re going to look at the mock-ups and wonder why our drafts look nothing like the final designs showcased above. And you would be right to be curious. On the face of things it’s hard to see the relation, but I can assure you we played our part(s).
The Interesting thing about this Re-Design
Before you look at the mock-ups then, it’s probably interesting to know how Collis went about the project. He approached 3 designers, myself, Aaron Lynch & Kai Loon informing us of his master plan to give the Marketplace a refresh. He wanted a new perspective on the design and some ideas from outside of his own head.
Our brief was to create something from a fresh pair of eyes, and offer something different to Collis. We had a lot of creative freedom as we we’re always aware that Collis was going to take our designs and create something himself, we just had to offer him something different that he could take away, take elements from – or simply just use them as inspiration. For me it was a clever approach on Collis’ part, it offered him a variety of styles from a variety of designers that he could take and shape into a fantastic design.
Our Early Design Drafts
Now I wouldn’t normally share screenshots of work that didn’t follow through into the final live version, but this was such a unique and different approach to a re-design process that I don’t mind sharing some screenshots with you all. Keep in mind these snippets are from 3 different design concepts.
You can see from the details above the overall level of finish and quality. Something that Envato uphold throughout all of their websites, but other than that I wanted to try something that I purposely wouldn’t normally do, rather than trying to create that typical Envato look I though that Collis would much rather appreciate something that was different, even if it wasn’t ever really going to be used as the base of a design there’s various elements that I offered in a different light.
Full Screenshots of the designs (if you must)
Concept 1 – A polished finish with a minimalistic approach.
Concept 2 – A slight hint at texture and injection of colour.
Concept 3 – A lot of colour & big bold typography.
Looking through the final live version of Flashden for example I can see things that could have been made as a result of my designs, but there’s a lot of it that never crossed over – but that was never really the point of this project.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of our Icons, that are on sale – are being used throughout the marketplace, and we just love seeing our icons used, especially when they are executed so well. Feel free to share in the comments where you are using our icons.
Custom Icon Design
One thing we did complete from start to finish was a re-vamp of the Envato badge icons that are used throughout the Marketplace, on profiles & portfolio’s of all of the users. There was already a full set of icons that were being used, so we had to touch-up and re-draw the ones that worked well enough, but then come up with a completely new concept for many of the icons.
Why not check out all of the badges out for yourself.
Now Go Check It Out
Now that the site is all new and shiny it’s the perfect time to sign up, if you haven’t already. *Note Signing up an account will give you access to all of the network sites. There’s a lot of offer across the Network, everything from Icons to Sound & Video files, a truly remarkable network of sites, and a huge pleasure to work on.
Follow Me
You can now follow authors on Graphic River & the other Marketplaces. It’s a great way to keep up to date with your favorite authors and the recent updates are shown very neatly on the front page for you. It’s a fantastic way to keep your eyes on what is going on.
Graphic River Updates
Twitter Updates
Follow the other people mentioned:
@collis @aaronlynch and @kailoon – *all well worth following!