In the beginning of the summer I posted an ad where I asked for web designers interested in having a go at integrating all the KarjaSoft pages into one logical unit. Essentially, what I want is a unified presence in order to explore synergies between my different projects – e.g. Cynical Stuff, the KarjaSoft company webpage and the different game pages. Yes, you may now slap me in the face for using both “unified presence” and “explore synergies” in the same sentence. Either way, I got a couple (as in two) responses…that somehow missed the mark a little.

What I desperately need is a designer. Not a programmer (I can code PHP myself, goddammit!) or an artist (what good is a pretty logo if it’s just sitting there like a bloated toad?) – a web designer! But somehow the word design gets lost when one mentions web design. Web design almost inevitably gets interpreted as either “make a logo” or “do a customized content management system.” Design is of course present in both making a logo and writing code, but my needs were for a person more keen on usability and design in the classical sense.

To make a short story long: In the end I sighed and shook my blonde curls in dismay, and decided to have a go at it myself instead. Hey, at least it’s a learning experience, right? Here’s what I ended up with as my first concept:

This is supposed to be the Games page; a list of all KarjaSoft games with easily accessible links to each game. Clicking a game logo leads you to the specific game’s page. The color scheme and the logo is modified for each game, but the main design is kept in order to give a sense of unity. Also, the navigation buttons in the top right are present on all pages. As you can see I’ve used common terms instead of titles. If someone sees a button with Cynical Stuff it is probably hard to guess that it leads to this blog, but by typing out Blog everyone will instantly know where it leads.

And yes. If I adopt this design, it will mean that Cynical Stuff will be redesigned according to this as well. As long as I can make a decent WordPress template out of it, that is.

Any thoughts? Does it look like cat vomit? Does it look okay?

Tags: concept, design, karjasoft, redesign, web design

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Observations, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.