Minimal Monkey

I came up with a few ideas of how I wanted the site to work and sketched them down. However, when I tried to translate these ideas into designs they never quite looked as slick as they did in my head.

During this time one of the designers at Fi, Tobias van Schnieder, had just moved from the Stockholm office to NYC. I explained my predicament to him, showed him my sketches and asked if I could pick his brain on design stuff once I had something half decent in Photoshop. The very next day, without me asking, he came in with designs for me!

I loved the stuff Tobias came up with and you can see from the screenshots below that the final site changed very little from his original designs.

A couple of people I spoke to thought it was a little strange that, being a web developer, I didn’t design my own site. However, I have to disagree. Let me put it this way, if I was going to build my own house I’d get an architect to design it otherwise I’d end up living somewhere like this.

One of the main requirements for my site, which I think Tobias got spot on, was that I needed something to look great but I don’t necessarily have lots of nice images that I can use. Plus prepping graphics for a blog post takes time and might put me off adding content. I was worried that without images my blog would just look plain and boring but, with the colors, I think it looks great!

Another great thing about the designs is that all my old blog posts from over the past few years fit nicely with minimal work required to integrate them. Whether they should all still be here is another debate and I may well delete some of the older, now irrelevant posts.