Fresh
After introducing the “Cubic” style for Bartelme Design I got a lot of positive feedback. My site was even featured at CSS Beauty, which was really an honor. But after five months I felt that it is time to start something new.
In my opinion one negative aspect of the cubic style was the lack of vivid colors. Well, “Cubic” was already much more colorful than “Rounded”, but in contrast to other sites it looked a bit washed out. And to tell the truth, I also wanted to get rid of those separating lines and 3D shadow effects, which are much overused these days.
Fresh
So I launched Photoshop and started to create first sketches of the new layout. I took a screen of “Cubic” and in a first step I removed all unnecessary lines. Hm, much cleaner. Afterwards I slightly changed the proportions of the content area and the sidebar, making the whole site look more balanced.
And finally I tried to find a new color scheme — in my opinion the hardest part of the redesign, because choosing the wrong colors can destroy the whole layout. But after some time I was sure that the new color scheme was exactly what I was looking for. Not bad — and it just took me about four to five hours to create the whole new design…
Feedback
By the way, there are still some minor layout bugs to be fixed. So if you experience any weird behavior just let me know. But I think that you should get an acceptable result in all recent browsers, including Safari, Firefox, IE6, Opera, Camino and Omniweb.
If you don’t like the new layout or if you still see the old one just scroll down to the footer and select your favorit style. Due to strict separation of style and content, the cubic as well as the rounded style can still be applied. However, I’m really looking forward to getting feedback from you.
