The making of gummisig.com — Part 1

My pre­vi­ous employer in Den­mark, Bjarne Lind­lab, always said that the car mechan­ics car was the crap­pi­est car on the streets. The mechanic never has time to fix his own, always busy work­ing on other peo­ples automobiles.

I really wanted to avoid this hap­pen­ing to me when I started free­lanc­ing. After all, what is a free­lance web designer with­out his own web­site? Kind of like a cham­pi­onship swim­mer with­out his swim­ming trunks, but let´s not get to deep on that analogy.

I knew from the get go that I wanted to use word­press. I had done some sites in word­press before, but never a design port­fo­lio, let alone one that should be as con­tent heavy as I had planes to make gummisig.com. So I started look­ing around for themes that could be the back­bone of the operation.

The first one I saw was Sharp­fo­lio. It looked very good but never ful­filled my wishes and I knew noth­ing about cus­tomiz­ing word­press so to speak. So i decided to leave word­press alone for a while and make some design sketches and focus on the social port­fo­lios instead while the design was brewing.

Some­times start­ing from a com­pletely blank can­vas can be scary, this time it was! I felt pres­sure to get some­thing out asap since I needed some­thing to rep­re­sent my home or office on the net. How were prospec­tive clients sup­posed to find my if I had noth­ing? All the pres­sure came from myself of course. But as it turned out a per­sonal web­site wasn’t what peo­ple looked at that much. At least I have been doing free­lance work suc­cess­fully for a few months now, almost half a year with­out hav­ing a web­site. But enough about that.

I started sketch­ing in pho­to­shop and paper and made some really bad designs, hehe. But when I look back at them now I real­ize how nec­es­sary they were for the final result. On one that looked like it looks like, you can see the first clouds come out. I just love clouds, could stare at them all day, so i really needed to have clouds in there to get some kind of per­sonal touch to it all. I want the site to rep­re­sent me as a designer and per­son.

Then I tried some stuff with the sharp­fo­lio tem­plate, that looked like I was just start­ing out in the busi­ness. And then it hap­pened, it was a bee. Yes that lit­tle bee and flower set me on the right course. It was from that idea that the final site orig­i­nated. I wanted to illus­trate some­thing beau­ti­ful and nat­ural and thought of a bee and flower. Ubuntu con­cept you know. This is because that is.

I then went on to try hun­dreds of ideas for this basic lay­out that came from the flower and bee. The lay­out still remains the same but the back­ground and typog­ra­phy has changed count­less times.

It was from here that I worked hard to fin­ish the site design. I went through a plethora of iter­a­tions for the back­ground before I set­tled on the one that I´m using today. And I love this back­ground I might add.

The major­ity of the work that remained was done only with css & html, and some php of course. That stuff I´m gonna talk about in part 2.

I cant say the design is com­pletely fin­ished, so the work is ongo­ing. So stay tuned human