Last year we took on one of our biggest projects yet, working on the new Smashing Magazine re-design. In this post we’ll look at some of the elements we designed for the project, many of which nobody has seen before.
The Brief
The brief was for a re-fresh or update of the current design, rather than an overhaul. They wanted things to be crisper, cleaner and more together – but a lot of the elements needed to stay, so that it still had a familiar feel & felt like something that people were used to.
Launch Project Photo Gallery
Not everything we created made it in to the live site. So we’ve decided to show a gallery of some screen-shots & previews of our involvement in the process.
We’ve put together some photographs of various ideas and work in progress from the early stages of the design. The photos were taken during the design process, and there has been various changes made since, by both ourselves and the Smashing team. But it does show an exclusive look at the early stages of the design process.
Wireframe & Moodboard
The first stage was to work on a wire-frame & mood-board, we showcased our initial ideas on a combination of both. Presenting some solid ideas like this backed up by examples and solid reasons it makes the start of any project much easier.
Things That Never Made it
Since handing over the project to the Smashing Magazine team a lot of changes have been made. So a lot of the work we did never actually saw the light of day, which is why this post has been made and also why we’ve uploaded a Gallery.
Some of the things, in our opinion look better in earlier versions than they do on the live site. But at the same time there’s a lot of good that came from the client feedback and a lot of improvements have been made.
In my honest opinion, the current live site is in need of a little fixing up. We’ve been in touch with the Smashing Magazine team about some of the changes they’ve made, and put forward some improvement ideas of our own. Whether things will change I’m not sure, as we’re no longer actively involved in the project, but we have kept in touch with the team – and shared our honest feelings with them.
A quick look at some early details
Here’s a quick look at some details we quite liked, but we never got to use, for one reason or another. Even though they weren’t used they were a starting point for changes for both us and the Smashing Mag team.
We also worked with our good friend Pasquale D’Silva again on this project, he provided the character Illustrations for the about us pages. The characters were later used by the team for other things, but never as we originally planned it as part of a “meet the staff’ feature (above).
Speaking of Pasquale
As mentioned the characters we’re made by Pasquale D’Silva. We came up with the idea of having him draw each of the staff members to use on the about us page. Something that the clients loved. Here’s a preview of the 4 brilliant characters he came up with.
The Experience In Conclusion
Working on such a huge part of the design community was always going to be a challenge. It was a huge honour to be involved with the team and the project and all in all I’m proud of the work we did on the project.
As with any project there is always things I wish could have been different, but on the whole we’re happy with the work we put into the project and how things looked when we were done, and it really was such a massively fantastic project to have been involved in.