Welcome to Smarterware’s new look! (If you’re seeing this in your feed reader, pop open a browser tab, wouldya?)
This little blog is now workin’ the internet runway sporting a new logo and design. While I love Lucian Marin’s Journalist template that I launched Smarterware with back in January, I wanted to add custom imagery to the site, something readers would see in their tab bar and recognize immediately.
People in the biz call this a “logo.”
Since I’m the coder sort, I’m kind of thick when it comes to these matters. Thankfully, logo designer extraordinaire Annedien Hoen hooked me up. She and I first talked back in February (7 months ago!) and it was the first time I worked with a designer directly on anything. From the Netherlands to San Diego, our initial consultation was an intense hour and a half discussion–not about lines and colors, but about inspirations, motivations, intentions, and feelings.
Yup, it was a therapy session. I yammered on at Annedien about computers, teaching, learning, writing, habits, goals, cyborgs, automation, creativity, productivity, motivation, brainwaves, my childhood, and stuff I like to look at. She asked well-placed questions, and got me to tell her what I’m trying to do on these pages in ways I hadn’t articulated before. Then she turned all that into an image. I’m so pleased with the simplicity and containment of the result. I’ve got ideas about what the logo represents, but I’ll let you interpret it on your own.
Once the logo was done, Patricia Forest at 3ones waved her magic wand and designed the site’s pages around it. Trish wasn’t even a little bit judgmental when I confessed my love of circuit boards to her. As always, she did beautiful things with color and typography and made the posts and comments here look downright spiffy. This is why when you need online product development work done and ask me who to talk to, I send you to 3ones.
Finally, because I thought it would be a fun learning experience, I decided to turn the HTML and CSS Trish gave me into a working WordPress theme myself. I’d modified WordPress themes before, but never built one from scratch. Late in the game I got worried about this undertaking: When I asked my Twitter followers for tips, I got replies like “gird your loins.” But, call me a sadist. I really enjoyed pawing through the WordPress codex and getting it all to work bit by bit. Trish’s markup was clean and modular, and I speak PHP, so the process was pretty smooth and very satisfying. My favorite “WordPress can do that?” moment: Figuring out how to configure multiple sidebars and display them based on context. You’ll notice the sidebar content is different on a post page than on the front page than on a user profile than in search results. Booyah.
I finished up the theme in a mad dash that ended just before 4am, so most likely things are broken and it’s all my fault. Give the new look and feel a spin and let me know what you think in the comments. (They’ll look really good when you do, I promise.) Thanks to Annedien and Trish for all their work. I am going to bed now.
21 Comments
Igor Sabol
I like the new logo and the design!
They look better than the previous ones.
*THUMBS UP*
Tomasz Surowiec
Hi Gina, this is my first comment on your site, I’ve been reading lifehacker for long time, and smarterware since TWiG 🙂
and now I’m confused – I use GReader for all my stuff, but now, with this design… I’ll have to give it up 🙂 great work – it’s nice and clean and what is most important – unique – so after first glance I already know where I am…
Carlos González
Hi Gina: This is also my first comment here, just wanted to congrats you! The new logo and design look great, I think your color palette is great. Recently I went through a similar situation with my web site, so I can tell how proud should you be feeling now. Enjoy it and best wishes!
James Adams
New site looks great. I like how “clean” it looks.
trevorbramble.com/
To be honest, I was expecting a step back from the previous (wonderfully clean and plain) design when you spoke of this earlier. I was wrong. =^)
You managed to snag some great help and put together a stylish theme that’s still pleasantly reserved. Well done!
ashutosh
The new design is awesome!
Though I must admit I was really shocked by the weird bug which showed me I’d logged in as a different Facebook user every time I refreshed this post! It’s gone now, thankfully. 🙂
Alan Simpson
Gina, I think the design is slick. And great use of a circumpunct in your logo.
There is a troubling note I have to make though. When I came to your page I was logged in to your site with someone else’s Facebook account. I don’t know who this person was and I’m the only one who’s on this computer. I quickly logged out and logged into my own account.
I assume there’s a session id cookie issue of some sort. But I know you’re an expert so I won’t presume to speculate 🙂
Kirk Friggstad
Wow… it’s very… ummm… green.
Seriously, though – it’s a neat design, I like the logo, like the layout, it just feels like it could use a bit more contrast. Kind of reminds me of when I was growing up – we had a cheap Apple ][+ clone (Syscom II) with a monochrome green screen. Maybe it’ll grow on me.
Anyhow, it’s the content that matters, and since I follow the RSS feed it shouldn’t bother me too much. 🙂 Sorry to be a bit of a contrarian here – like I said, it looks good, just a little too much green for my personal taste.
phoenix
Very clean, very slick, and I really like some of the little touches that a lot of folks may not readily notice (but I do because I’ve seen far too many wordpress themes for one person), I love it!
Smartware is lookin’ sharp! I also dig the new logo something fierce; very simple but very effective. Keep up the good work!
Gina Trapani
Thanks everyone for your comments, and sorry things were so slow there for awhile. That glitch that made it look like you were logged in as someone else should be fixed. (Sorry!)
This design IS obviously a big commitment to green, but I think the overall effect is worth it. And yeah, I expect most of you are reading the site RSS anyway, so it’s up to you whether or not you want to look at it! 🙂 I’ll be tweaking things as I go along or find problems as well, so list ’em here if you see anything else off.
Aprazeth
Looks great, and so far I haven’t seen anything broken yet.
And yes I do read this site mostly via RSS, but I broke out the good ol’ real browser for this event 😉
Peter Kaizer
Gina~ Nice new look! Congratulations.
UnMicD
I like the new design a lot. You and your designers have done great job. I’m looking forward to continuing to read your posts.
Steve Hall
I love the look, and the logo. And for all you GReader users, don’t forget Better GReader will let you view the site’s actual layout within GReader! 🙂
sathishpaul
I love the new design Gina. Certainly better than the previous one, gives the site a geeky look; much like the Linux minty look if you will :). Great job!!! Keep it coming
–Paul
Yawar Amin
Good stuff! I like it. Quick bug report: I’m not seeing the body in Calibri, even though I definitely have it installed. (It’s rendering in Arial.) This is on Chrome 3 0 195 21, Vista SP2.
Barrett Bowen
I really like the way all of this functions. The Facebook connect feature is awesome! Is that your work? A downloadable plug-in? Both?
Andrew
This is a great new look for your site, Gina. Simple yet impressive.
Dane Hesseldahl
Wow.
Theme looks fantastic Gina.
Excellent work!
Annedien Hoen
It’s great to see people dig the design! 🙂
Thejesh GN
It looks great. Congrats.