This weekend I finished the much-nagged-for redesign of Moment Ago, the weblog of Jolene Spry, PR pimpadelic cyberhottie gamer geekstress extraordinaire, who is also (amazingly enough) my best friend. I got her into blogging a few months back and set her up with WordPress. She’s got a design background, but primarily dealing with Flash, so she’s a bit of a standards newbie. We spent a few days covering the basics of CSS, radically modifying someone else’s template as a starting point. Jolene got things quite presentable on her own (with some tips and guidance) but there’s just so much to learn and she was never happy with it, so I offered to design a new site from scratch to her specifications.
It took a total of maybe 20 hours spread out over a few weeks. Many instant message conversations and 14 screenshots later, she was finally happy with the mockup and I commenced building the CSS today. Since she wasn’t making it herself, I wanted to at least personalize it as much as possible. The header image is a crop of a photo she took at the beach near her house in Orange County. The cartoon stick girl is scanned from her drawing and the Moment Ago logo is her scanned handwriting. The background is adapted from one of the many spiffy and trendy pixel patterns at Squidfingers. And finally, the subtle watermark barely visible behind each post is inspired by a tattoo on her left ankle.
There may still be some bugs and tweaks over the next few days. I’ll need to tidy up the stylesheet, test it in a few other browsers, I’m planning to add a ubiquitous contact form, and I’ll continue to give her a hard time about that massive pile of links. But overall I’m rather proud of it. It may not be a particularly groundbreaking design, but my client is happy and paid me generously in IM smileys, and that’s what really matters.