After over one and a half years, the sheer repugnancy of Icon Designer, my portfolio website, and my blog started to embarass me to such an extent that I was forced to design something I could live with. It also gave me a much-needed reason to do some real modifications to the blog to lower the posting threshold for myself. Check out the new websites, the cool new icons and client work, and read on, as I will need your help, and tell you a bit more about the new designs.
I grossly underestimated the task of designing my new websites at least thrice, even assuming plans for the approach of gathering a good amount of testers to make it relatively perfect, and I soon realized that if I’d abide by my own rigorous steps, it’d never be finished. That’s why the designs are still not working properly in Internet Explorer (yes, I know – I suppose I should really let the lot of them be, but I’ve got corporate clients that really have little choice), and you may find a little bug in the design or page while you’re intensely browsing the new websites. My apologies for that, and I hope to fix it soon. In the mean time, if you find something broken, even the tiny things, please inform me so I can change things. Better still, if you know how to fix said error or bug, please inform me about it as well as you can in the time you have on your hands. It’s very much appreciated.
Anyway, I am drifting here. The new blog design is a great departure from the previous one, and I’m quite happy with it. It’s quite a lot cleaner, it’s more efficient for your browser, and prettier. I’ll also (once I get around to it) post some ‘linked’ entries, which are basically not more than just a link to something I find very cool and see-worthy. They’re uniquely designed, but since it requires a lot of fiddling to get it working OK with the RSS feed, it’s not yet quite ready for showtime. There’s also neat buttons, image previews, and much more; take a gander. I’ll also do some more posts about gaming, and included a little widget that lets you see what kind of games I’m currently engorged in. The excellent header typography is once again provided by my awesome type friend Jelmar of Typehigh.
Icon Designer and Cocoia have been completely redesigned from the ground up as well. Enjoy all the new content on Icon Designer (especially Hyperion, my huge new set of 95 icons!) and check out the crisp Cocoia company site. All ready for some big new projects that will see daylight soon!
I’m also pleased to wish you all a very happy new year, and all the best for 2009! I hope to show you much more awesome stuff early next year! :)
Wow ! Congrats on the new design.
Its good that you have left your old design on the way to a new year. This is very clean and classy.
But I have seen some problems in FireFox. In the bottom its already flooded, Here is a screenshot for reference : http://localhostr.com/files/490238/capture.png
Well done, fantastic work. It could be said that a designers own site is often the toughest bit of work to complete – you made it look easy though!
Hey Sebastiaan, overall it’s looking great. I did find this a couple rather glaring bugs in the blog design though:
http://www.quicksnapper.com/danvpeterson/image/untitled-0001
http://www.quicksnapper.com/danvpeterson/image/cocoia-blog-color-profile-bug
Hey Dan, thanks for the images. What version of FF are you using?
Edit: Nevermind, figured it out. Both issues fixed :)
I find it best to just not save files with color profiles, if you’re going to be using them on websites. Saves a ton of headaches.
Hey Sebastiaan Great job on the redesign. I was beginning to wonder if it would ever get done, but I knew that when you finished it it would be amazing. And this definitely exceeds expectations which were already very high.
About some bugs:
http://www.icondesigner.net/photon.html
When I click the right arrow, it takes me to an error page. I think that can easily be fixed by fixing a link. adding the doubletwistlogo.html instead of doubletwist.html.
http://www.icondesigner.net/fuzzemasure.html wasn’t loading for me. I’m using the latest version of Safari and everything else seems to be loading fine.
http://www.icondesigner.net/classics.html
After clicking the right button, it takes me to http://www.icondesigner.net/ll4iphone.html.
That’s all I found, but these are pretty simple to fix I should guess. I really love the redesign and can’t wait to see more!
– Kiro
Nice, quick fixes. Looking good man! :)
Wahahah! I am *loving* the new looks Sebastiaan! The harddrive icons in your Hyperion set are beautiful [duh, lol] as well. I want some Cake though. :P
Hey Sebastiaan, I’m using Opera and I found some quirks:
[ http://pw-software.com/uploads/cocoia_beta.JPG ]
I see I’m not the only one thinking about site redesigns either … the changing of years seem to do that to people.
Love the redesigns, Sebastiaan. Very clean.
A couple of little bugs to squash:
http://www.quicksnapper.com/pacheco/image/cocoia-gt-vision-camino-1-6-6
http://www.quicksnapper.com/pacheco/image/icon-designer-camino-1-6-6
Both seem to be Camino issues, so it may not be worth the trouble.
And here:
http://www.icondesigner.net/icondesign/
The link to Fuzzmeasure is broken, and I believe it’s a slight misspelling in the link:
http://www.icondesigner.net/fuzzemasure.html
as opposed to: fuzzmeasure.html
Hope that helps. Keep up the good work!
Little bug in Icon Designer using Safari 3.2.1:
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/43704/Icon-Designer.jpg
I noticed on your Icon Design page (http://www.icondesigner.net/icondesign/) You have a link to the FuzzMeasure icon, but it doesn’t exist, http://www.icondesigner.net/fuzzemasure.html throws a 404
http://blog.cocoia.com/2008/10/23/designing-classics/ renders weird in Safari 3.1.2: http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/348/picture24ai3.png
Well done – great work!
Congrats to the new website! I really like how it turned out.
Totally awesome redesign! Keep cranking out great stuff.
Looks great, loving the colors on the blog.
The only thing I would note at this time is that when viewing icondesigner.net on an iphone when you click an icon to reach more info the hover tooltip pops up and then you have to click the icon again to reach the page.
Thanks all! I think I got most issues on the blog sorted out now. It still doesn’t work in IE, of course, and I’m checking into a rendering issue with FF 2.0.
Really like the new look. Maybe a tick too mac-ish but still very nice ;)
Oh and the three buttons in the top right (the subscribe to RSS, about and the send stuff) look somehow blurry and fuzzy. The text and the icon that is. As the rest of the page looks normal to my eyes, I don’t think it’s them.
(Using FF 3.1b2)
Very nice :)
Love the texture!
Really brilliant. Looks great. Hyperion is amazing! Great work.
You are having some font-hinting issues with your image buttons on the right hand side. You need to ensure that everything is on whole-pixel boundaries (also widths and heights) before exporting to a bitmap type image.
It will greatly reduce the ‘fuzzy’ looking text. Shoot me an email if I need to clarify.
@Bryan: I think it’s actually been accidentally upscaled by a percent. I’m well aware how to create crisp images with being on pixel boundaries et al (see smaller icons), but this image seems to have been mishandled. I’ll fix it soon :)
Hello, Sebastiaan! Love your work. But the link to War 2 DMG on the website is dead. Any chance to fix it? Can’t download those icons.
Thanks,
Ilya