Jump to content

1985 Edition: Designing my blog


CS85

Recommended Posts

Before I begin, I'm obviously going to whore my blog, 1985Edition.com.  I write mostly about the Chicago Bears, but also my personal goings on, sometimes the very rare Cubs or Blackhawks post.  

 

 

So there's really not a lot to the design, but I was very pleased with how it turned out.  My inspirations were to make something clean, elegant, and timeless, because my writing ability is so good and my thoughts so incredibly poignant that it deserves a look that sells it as such.

 

Jokes aside, I loved the Wordpress theme I went with and wanted to make a look that fit the style of the page.  Here's an example of how a post is laid out:

 

SHfEi8U.png

 

The look is very clean on its own, and the font I went with, PT Serif, is easy to read, has some nice flourish to it, and I didn't want to leverage legibility for style.  I wanted the design to echo the font, and to serve the layout without feeling forced.

 

pt-serif-1-00-en.png

 

--------------

 

The theme allotted for a header, and the larger you make the header, the more space it takes up on the page.  I wanted to make it rectangular so as to feel and fit naturally, whereas something round would look weird and unnecessarily expand that top bar.  I want people to acknowledge the design and source of the writing, but I don't want it to ruin the experience by draping itself over so much of the page.

 

I took inspiration for a design from two things:

 

  • The iconic and simple LIFE magazine and National Geographic mastheads:

 

image-634637-galleryV9-lxlc-634637.jpg

 

ng-black-logo.ngsversion.5a7a6591.png

 

  • And primarily the numbers on my family's home address.

KdUPb3W.png

 

 

What I came up with was a marriage of those ideas, and, like I said, there's not much to it, but I was very happy with the simple look.

 

GaZ1xd4.png

 

It's legible, imperfect, and works for me.

 

The spacing is probably a bit off, but whatever.  I'll worry about that later.  #professional #designer #artist #kony2012

 

The fonts I went with were a slightly transformed version of Engravers MT and AveFedan

 

Engravers is a pretty formal font, but I love the serifs, big round terminals (I think that's the typeface industry term, anyway).  I mushed it together a bit to make it feel like disparate, getting some of the "air" out of the rectangular crate it's stuffed in.  With the big flags and swooping serifs, I needed to compress it into something static, and I felt like it's pushed together just enough to stay legible without being too obviously cramped.

 

AveFedan is a wonderful font that is so fluid and easy on the eyes.  It makes it look like there's almost a signature on the logo, and breaks up the sharpness of the rest of the masthead.  There's no font like it anywhere else on the page, so it certainly stands out.

 

As this is a social media world, and most of these damn pages are using circular pictures, I also had to craft something simple and small to work as a twitter emblem. 

The rectangular masthead wasn't going to work, and none of that text is going to fit into a damned globe, so I went with this:

 

y2s3n97.png

It's kind of 'cheating' to just have '85 inside of a circle, but ...

 

l9XtKxT.gif

 

The apostrophe fits naturally and it maintains the simplicity I was going for.

 

------------

 

Anyway, thanks for reading, and if you have thoughts or criticisms, I'd love to hear them.

 

 

Quote
"You are nothing more than a small cancer on this message board. You are not entertaining, you are a complete joke."

twitter

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Your apostrophe is upside down. To go in front of a number (as an abbreviation like '85), it should look like a raised comma, not the beginning of a single quote.

 

This is also known as the "apostrophe catastrophe".

Back-to-Back Fatal Forty Champion 2015 & 2016

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.