---
title: "Redesign progress update"
author: Steve McKinney
date: 2016-06-27T06:27:00+00:00
lastmod: 2016-08-28T09:57:12+00:00
categories: ["Design"]
url: https://iamsteve.me/blog/redesign-progress-update
---

One of my aims during redesigning this website is to keep the seamlessness between content output and redesign. It’s not the easiest of tasks, as any time spent writing, is time taken away from the redesign or vice versa.

It also means every post I work on, the redesign release gets pushed back, or it takes away from a potential queue addition. As I don’t want to stop the weekly output, I think it’s worth posting a progress update to think some things through.

## Why redesign

As I haven’t announced in great detail that I’m doing a redesign (why would it matter?) I want to reflect on that. This site was last redesigned early 2012, which was the year I graduated from University. I prepared a portfolio, and setup the site to be very focused on getting a job. Now I’ve been in the industry for nearly 5 years, much has changed for me professionally, but this website has remained the same.

There is a level of complacency that happens with having a job. You get comfortable and don’t really update your portfolio, which can really leave you lagging behind. As a result of this I eventually removed the portfolio and made some tweaks. They were focused on moving the website in a direction of having an active blog. This made sense, as it was something I proved to myself, that I could do regularly.

### A new logo then redesign the site

As mentioned in the [logo redesign post](https://iamsteve.me/blog/iamsteve-a-new-logomark), the full redesign is something I originally started in around 2013. I made good progress with the design, but the design world shifted to flat and what I made was heavily ‘skeuomorphic’. I was put off by that, I didn’t want to appear outdated. It had a negative effect, I wasn’t motivated to start again. I just couldn’t get behind ‘flat’ and the amount of time it takes to redesign a website in your personal time.

On more recent reflection that design still met criteria of a redesign, but the shift in direction means, that much of it in terms of layout, would need to change.

### The scrapped design

I explored several other ideas, within a similar style. Some of these versions at the time were testing my skills of visual design. It was a fun design process.