Design a blog website to house my writing and build an email list.

Challenge

Design and develop a blog website to build an online audience and host my blog posts on the topics of high performance design and how to be a more valuable designer.

Constraints

The blog was built on Wordpress due to its extensive plugin-in ecosystem, extensibility, and my existing experience developing many websites with the platform.

Process

Since this project was my own personal project in my own personal brand I had zero existing brand constraints or design guidelines to follow. I had the freedom to define my own visual design language.

I identified my top goals for my brand and design aesthetic: Minimal, legible, and Approachable. I wanted to design a website and personal brand that was professional enough to be taken seriously, but not too serious that it wasn’t approachable or relatable.

 I started by viewing started by creating mood boards from other authors and any other website that fit the design goals for my project. I created a simple style-guide to ensure consistency in my Sketch design documents and CSS down the road.design my project goals.

 I explored multiple Wordpress frameworks to find the best lightweight framework that would allow it to be reasonable customized to fit my design needs with only CSS edits of a child theme.

 I iterated on my designed and cycled through multiple iterations as the website evolved between my Sketch designs and my CSS coding implementation.