DerekAllard.com : CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and the World of Web Design

Rebuilding DerekAllard.com: The invasion has progressed

February 05^th, 2009

Who doesn’t love cheesy killer robots? Nobody that’s who!

I’ve decided to give my blog a facelift. We’ve been living with the old design for a few years now, and those darn robots just weren’t making as much progress on the invasion as they thought they would - so I decided to help them along with a rebuild.  Here’s the before and after:

I’ve already posted a couple of little teasers on my blog (The robot invasion is progressing and All your DerekAllard.com are belong to us). This was partially to keep myself motivated I have to admit, but I’ve also found that as I’ve expressed myself more and more though other outlets (Twitter, IM, email), the blog has gotten a bit neglected.  Also, with 110% of my energy being devoted to EE2 for so long, I just haven’t had much that I’m able to write about lately.  A rebuild seemed like a great way to re-engage this tired old blog.

There were of course a few ground rules:

• So, I needed to stay with a robot-theme (d’uh).
• I needed the rebuild to take as little of my time as possible. This meant no new layout, and essentially cosmetic tweaks.
• I wanted to keep all current functionality, and didn’t really want to add anything new. No tagging, no streaming twitter updates (although I like the idea, I just didn’t want it here). Same as before, only fresher.

To get the ball rolling, I contacted illustrator Scott Thigpen who I had met through the ExpressionEngine Professionals network. He’d done some really great work for some others, and I really dug his style. So I started out by sending him an email asking if he’d be interested. Fortunately for me, Scott is a fan of robots ;)  After an initial back and forth, these arrived in my inbox.

I have to say… I loved them. I picked my favourite as number 5. My last robot had been standing, facing square on to the viewer. I wanted something a little more different, a little more “fluid”, so I asked Scott if we could have him “holding a tiny white dude with a beard (me) and failing him around”; “smashing a tank or really anything”, or “plugging itself in to a computer or something”.  Yeah, I know, artistic direction at its finest right? Well Scott totally came though.  What follows is a progression as we worked through the concept.

I loved it. Now this is the robot I want representing me!  A few buildings, a parallax effect, and some subtle flash work later (move your mouse around the menu) and the main component of the site was done. I spend a weekend and a few evenings tweaking the stylesheet to get the colours I wanted, and I’m finally ready to take this sucker live.

I consider it very much a work in progress - there is still a lot I want to do, but if I don’t post what I have I’m not sure the work will ever see the light of day.

This entry was made on February 05^th, 2009 @ 8:13 and filed into Noteworthy.