BlackMoon Design

Did you ever wondered where does the inspiration and ideas for webdesign come from?
Well – we would like to share the story of concept behind our site (the one you’re browsing now)

The idea

Some time ago I’ve looked at our old page and said to myself “what a piece of rubbish! we really need to have a new site!”.
We all agreed that we should make the new site “a blog”. Our first idea was pretty bad (I know that today) – I remember I’ve used
a lot of stripes and colorful icons – all shiny and “web 2.0″. Fortunately our friends (thanks goes to Rak and Kuba from SnowDog) told me
quite important thing – that you need a personality in your site, otherwise it simply won’t work.
So – there came another task – to define our personality first. We’re great wedesigners (and modest too;) – but we’re not corporate or boring kind of people. So – we figure out that our site should be funny, cool looking – and decided the “space” theme (cause we have quite “space” name and second – space explorers are daring, passionate, skilled professionals – just as we are:).

the first sketch I’ve done for our site

Al

We needed a “host” for our site – that how we get the idea for Al. I’ve wanted to do some sketches – and pinned it with the very first one. I have the Fallout game in my mind (it’s my favourite) – so maybe Al resembles the PipBoy character a little:)

Al’s sketch

Putting it together

Of course I’ve made detailed specification for the site. With detailed, formal description what we wanted to achieve, what features we need etc. As soon as the specification was written down and printed – I’ve made about 50 changes to it:).

specification after ‘minor’ changes

Let’s design

We left the development for a while and focused on the layout and produce a series of cartoon headers. (You can check them all by hitting the refresh button)
I’ve draw it with pencil at first, scanned and than vectorize it with Flash. I’ve also designed our icons (with Flash as well). I’ve twisted it a little, make some changes, rethink it, and I’ve left the layout for about a week. I’ve checked it after that time – and I still liked what I saw. (that’s the little test I use to check if design is good – leave it for some time, and than come back to it. Very often you’ll see that some elements need to be changed after this “second look”.) When the layout was complete – we were ready for the development.

one of headers’ sketches

icons’ sketch

Here we go

We’ve chosen the WordPress for our sites’ engine. Doc have created the theme (with some additional coding – since I wanted random headers on subpages and few other features) and we proceed with the installation. The whole development part took about 3 days.

After the battle

I think that the site worked out really good – since it got listed on cssmania and webcreme in the first week after launch.
If you think we might get our site better – please drop us a comment.
I hope you’ll enjoy staying here.