From Away

After a lot of work late into the night on Saturday, and into early Sunday morning, the new design for Jeff Smith Designs went live. I think this was the fastest design changeover that I’ve ever completed for one of my own sites. I am very hard to please when it comes to designing my own sites and it usually takes months of refining a layout in Photoshop and on paper before I come up with something that I truly think I can live with. This new design was born during lunchtime early last week and by Friday I was to the point of reorganizing the content and structure of the site.

I wanted to stray away from the traditional “blog-like” layout this time. I realize that the site still sports a two column layout, but I believe that the addition of a large amount of whitespace has given the site a very new perspective. I also think that the full page width header and footer tend to have the user focus on the content of the site (which is the main idea) rather than the design of the site. The design is extremely simple, but I feel that it is very effective.

My logo has also taken a bit of change of shape. I’ve used the logo that has been appearing on my business cards and letter head since early last spring. I figured that I needed to have a bit of parallel in design between my online and offline work. I think this logo is a lot smoother and more eye catching that what was featured previously on the site.

I urge you all to have a look at the new design and drop me a note to let me know what you think. I always welcome constructive criticism regarding my work.