Craig Rowe
Techlead / Developer
5th February 2012
Cargowire has a new design
Apparently doodling can be good for you. Although when I do it, it's not so good for Ed Merritt.
A bit before christmas I finally decided to sketch out some ideas I'd been having for a new layout and design for cargowire.
The idea was pretty simple. With the homepage acting as a funnel through which I push the various channels of blog, articles, portfolio and events I could have a consistent, relatively rigid, grid layout with obvious scope for responsiveness. The only problem was I wanted some nice design touches.
Luckily I work at a great agency where I get to share the building with some awesome designers... who I can then hassle for pro bono photoshop wizardry.
So Ed got my sketch, a paragraph explaining it and a skype along the lines of:
...a Sharp Retro look, kinda 50s with bright strong colours.
In our microcosm of the design process we'd started out with a wireframe and a genre based on some keywords and a few snippets of other sites (e.g. breadcrumbs from the guardian) - a losely held together 'mood board' if you like.
After a few iterations Ed came up with an automotive / americana feeling logo that fitted right with my thinking and from there the rest just grew into the original wireframe. He even did an html template for me... what a nice guy...
Although I'm pretty pleased with it I now have to hunt down a whole bunch of content that I didn't have on my previous site. While I do that, please bear with me with the Placeholder images!
So, cheers to Ed for the stunning design. Hopefully I won't bastardise it too much as I bend it to my will... although I might redo the markup and js ;-)
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