Corked 2.0: The Journey

One of the things about being a designer is that you’re almost never 100% satisfied. You can endlessly tweak positions, colors, and fonts if you’re not careful. About two months ago when I created the previous theme, Coloured, I was mostly happy with it. I thought it was a pretty interesting idea based on, of all things, my shower curtain and came out as a fairly interesting site design. I then asked the good folks at the Wordpress Forums to tell me what they thought. That’s when the unrest began.

One of the biggest comments was that the colored stripes, while interesting, distracted from the content of the site. TVDinner said it best with this comment:

to me it is a little to much, but that is just me. I guess my question to you is that I am not sure what it accomplishes as far as your site. I assume you want people to read your words, thoughts, posts, etc. I am all for creativity and use it on my sites, but also understand that there has to be a balance in design that will be attractive to viewers and keep them wanting to come back time and time again…

After about a week of going back and forth, and toning down the color of the stripes, I came to a conclusion: the stripes were distracting from the content. Unfortunately my stubbornness prevented me from actually hearing it from the good people in the forums. I came to the realization that I didn’t like pulling up my site. Considering that I am my sites most frequent visitor that says something. So the design that I was all to excited about quickly became a lame duck design and the search was on for a newer and sexier design.

I don’t know exactly how I originally found Mostly Lisa, but it happened sometime around my unrest with Coloured. I really liked her use of objects at the top of the page. Thinking about that lead me to an idea for a design:

I’d create a sort of virtual table where you, the viewer, were looking down directly at the table. Scattered on the table would various objects that the blog content features (video games, DVDs, camera, iPhone, pens, etc.). The content would then be found on sheets of paper on the table.

I thought it was brilliant. I quickly sketched it out, played with how the objects would interact with the content, and then set up a tri-pod and took pictures of various objects to be placed in the design. I started laying things out in Photoshop when I hit a snag, I couldn’t figure out how to integrate the site name into the design. I started cruising the typical inspiration web sites when I came across this. It was sort of what I was thinking about doing, enough to get me going at least. But after a little more searching I found this, this, this, this, and finally this. My idea was officially unoriginal and actually overused. I thought about trying to put a unique touch on the idea but decided that I didn’t want to create something that would feel, to me, just like a cheep knock-off.

I went back to the drawing board, again. This time, instead, I started looking at my previous designs. After a brief look at Mindless, I decided to return to my favorite design for this site, Corked. I had the idea for Corked literally for years before I made it a reality back in late 2006. The problem with corked, however, is in mid 2007 I accidently deleted all of the Photoshop files to make the design a possibility. Unfortunately for me they weren’t uploaded to the server and while announced, Apple’s Time Machine had yet to be released. I was officially boned. After all the work that went into this design, everything related to it was gone.

With nothing to start with other than the flattened .png’s and .jpg’s I decided to re-invent Corked, to give it a more modern and cleaner look. Instead of the entire site being a cork board, I’d create a virtual cork board complete with a wooden frame and I’d hang it on a textured virtual wall. I’d make sure that all of the site elements fit with the overall theme; if something is on the cork board it’d be “attached” in some fashion. Using only the original corked background and the BittBox paper vectors I created what you see here today, Corked 2.0.

While as a designer I’m never completely satisfied, I do enjoy the journey from one design to the next. I never know exactly where or how I’m going to get to the end point, and as you can see there are often many detours along the way, but in the end it’s all worth it and hopefully results in a quality and unique design.

However, even though I’m my biggest visitor, it doesn’t mean I’m the only one. What do you think of Corked 2.0?