We built the current version of slicksurface.com early in 2002. It was a good design at the time, and it still looks good (IMHO, for a 5+ year old site), but a 5 year old design just doesn’t cut it when you’re selling design services.

So, we’ve been toying with a new design for a few months now. The first design we seriously toyed with was this one (click to see full-size images):

We implemented the design on the blog for a while, but I never really loved the blog design, and the overall sense of the site still didn’t capture the vision we wanted to communicate to clients. The design was good and would have worked well on Dan’s portfolio pages, but it was a little weak on text-heavy pages. But more importantly, we wanted people to say “I want that” when they saw our site, and the design was ‘respectable’, but not necessarily ‘desirable’.

So I kept pushing Dan for another design, but it was difficult. It was hard to sites that we found inspiring. Even big ad agencies didn’t have great sites, and the sites they did for their client were often even worse. I did find a few, however, that I thought were good including Mortar’s site which was incredible, but the few I found were sufficient to get Dan to think outside the box and come up with a completely different design - which is the design of the page you’re looking at…

Since we never really fit the blog into the original site design, the blog is where we experiment with design concepts. So, with any luck, soon all of slicksurface.com will look like the blog page you’re looking at.

Personally, I love this design and I’m excited about redesigning the site. We’ve learned a lot about web sites in the past 5 years and we’ll finally be doing or ourselves what we’ve done for clients…

Since this is the initial test of the design of the site, if you happen to see any problems (browser compatibility, etc.), please let us know…

Tags: blogs, Design, slicksurface.com
Categories: Web Design