Brand, blogs, typography and the irony of change

My blog has been up for the better part of a year now. I was extremely happy when i finished designing it as i felt the design was suitable to not only my design aesthetic, but also it was something that would age gracefully. Like all my websites previous to this one ( currently on version 4 of designloom.) I had always utilized some form of natural/organic component to the look and feel. In previous versions, i had used leaves flowers and basically a lot of green to design my site.

It is because of this that Designloom finally got a proper brand. In late 2008 i started drawing the options of what that could be. I wanted something fairly geometric, and open; using Shaun Inman’s logo for fever

as an inspiration, i wanted something that conveyed clean equally balanced strokes . The more and more i refined the idea in my head the more i found a closer sense of what i wanted on the page. I knew typography for the actual words would be key, but secondary to the graphic i would be developing, as this would in turn be the one recognizable visual item that people could use to identify my work and site. All in all the type and the icon would speak to each other; the “design” word in the logo would be delicate and thin, like branches, and the “loom” would be heavier more like the trunk of a tree and one would reference the round aspects of the icon. In the end i used 2 typefaces which i know many people consider to be a crime, but i had my reasons!

The end result is what ive internally labled as the branch . A set of combined shapes that allude to leaves, capping of at the top with what feels like the beggining of a bloom.

I was extremely excited to release this into the wild, I wanted to start branding my work with this immediately and did so first on the relaunch of my portfolio, and now in the last 2 days with the blog. How ironic that it is on this day that a very popular web magazine focused on design would chose to write about my blog ( and many others) as a good example of web typography. Why? well because before the Designloom brand had been finalized and launched, the blog reflected one of the more handmade aspects of my design work. I had taken a very simple font, and overlapped it on top of one of my hand drawn decorative illustrations. This created the headline and top section of my blog, and something that i have gotten a good amount of attention from others viewing my site.

I will probably expand on this topic in a later date, but one thing i still consider key in web design, is knowing that sometimes its key to create environments that dont separate us too much from our humanity. hand drawn illustrations, type and elements are part of different techniques that designers can utilize to bring life to the web in ways that are not tied to how the code displays things. This is perhaps why the old designloom typography was successful, because it managed to live in its environment without causing much disruption, but serving the ultimate purpose of communicating where you where and speaking to the type of place you were in.

What a disappointment it must be for those who have linked through to my blog and stumbled on a site that no longer exemplifies that unique treatment of type, more importantly what will the backlash be for my new logo? will it die at the hands of the few who feel like i’ve changed the site for the worse, or will it be embraced as part of the natural evolution that comes from being a designer. I love that my work is getting noticed, but now i sit on this very precarious ledge that leads me to question my own decisions with my design. Perhaps it was fine as it was before, maybe i should have let sleeping dogs lie…

on the other hand, what growth could i have achieved if i never truly ventured into the realm of properly branding my online experience.

A very special thanks to Matt Cronin for giving my little blog some designlove, and i hope i have not disappointed him to much with the recent changes.