Ryan Keberly’s information regarding

Underwear • Keberly.org

Looking at yourself in your underwear is a good way to discover parts of your body that need improving—beer gut, love handles, what have you. So, why not do it with design?

I thought it would be interesting to look at my “design underwear” to discuss and dissect how this site’s design has evolved over time.

Comments follow each screenshot.

keberly.org

Original sketch to test out color palette and possible thumbnail treatment.

keberly.org

Refined design elements. Added mini-tabs to help categorize components, still trying to integrate aqua color in a more subtle way. Thumbnail and text archive feels a bit redundant. Really starting to dislike the mini-tabs.

keberly.org

Mini tabs are gone. Dropped the shocking aqua for a radial gradient. Added a background pattern to break up overpowering grid structure. Increased intensity of background glow. Angled strokes create a little more visual appeal without dominating interface.

keberly.org

Brought aqua-glow up into logotype area. Everything still feels boxy and constrained. Overall design isn’t terrible, but feels claustrophobic. Need to drop vertical strokes. Two-column footer feels predictable and boring. design feels like carbon-copy of existing work at The Snowsuit Effort… realizing that it’s hard to design around a single-photo focused homepage.

keberly.org

The final design breaks the vertical confines of the bounding-box. Single-photo focused homepage is dropped in favor of text-blog style entries and supporting feature photo/slideshow. Content is arranged in parallel columns for maximum extensibility. Dropped the serif typemark and treatment for classic Helvetica.

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The legalese, info, copyright and whatnot specific to my work and keberly.org.

  •     Ryan|at|Keberly.org
  •     XHTML/CSS
  •     © 2004-2007
  •     Keberly.org
  •     Don’t steal. Ever.

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