The Version 3 Beta of my portfolio site, AsymptoteDesign.com has been live for almost 2 months now, and I am hard at work on a finalized third version of the site. ‘Version 3 Beta’ was mostly a joke because in the Web 2.0 world, everything has a beta version for some reason, but it was also a way for me to quickly get up some of my new work with good HTML/CSS while at the same time getting rid of the crappy, two years old 2nd version of the site.

Re-Branding is a scary thing to do because you need to create an all new look, while at the same time not alienating everyone who knows your old brand (which wasn’t hard for me since no one knows my site haha). But going into Version 3, I knew it was time to re-brand my image. I have had the same exact look since 2003, and I designed it when I really had no idea about good design or what branding even was. So I started my re-branding by making a list of all the things that I didn’t like about my current image. Top of the list was the white backgrounds that took up 90% of the screen in the first two versions. My branding for the last 5 years was essentially straight out of the 90s GAP khaki commercials and Apple’s Switch campaign (If the Switch campaign brought the name Ellen Feiss to mind, you are a HUGE nerd…don’t even say she wasn’t super hot).

Don’t get me wrong, I love white space. Some of my most effective designs take advantage of vast amounts of white space, and I think it’s a great way to make an eye catching piece, but all of that WHITE white space had to go. As you can see in the Version 3 Beta, I went with a very dark gray background. The main reason for the switch was to get rid of as much white as possible, but the dark gray wasn’t just a random color choice.

Not to get sidetracked, but the original reason I chose the name Asymptote Design was to play off of the mathematics term asymptote, which is a curve that goes on for infinity towards a point. Thus hinting that there are ‘infinite possibilities’ with my designs. And what goes better with infinity than space, and what goes better with space than black for that matter?

At this point, I thought I tackled all my problems at once with the background color change. I had the space idea down, and I was planning on keeping the dark red (#820e02) as my main color to kick it old school a bit. This is reflected in my journal and in my beta site, but this all changed very quickly.

When I sat down a week or two ago to start designing the finalized version 3 of the site, I quickly realized that dark red and the gray I was planning on using (#222222) were not mixing well. My original color scheme was only 3 colors, and I really wanted to get away from that by expanding to at least 2 more colors to add some variance, and give me a few more choices to add emphasis on elements on the page. One way to add more colors, is to go for darker and/or lighter versions of the original color. With my asymptote red, this caused a problem because going any darker would make it barely visible against the black, and making it lighter created an effeminate (no offense) pink color. Having to change your color scheme is very scary thing, but I realized I had to do it. It was pretty sad letting go of Asymptote Red…I’d been using it for so long that I memorized the hex value (loser), but now I think it was for the best.

About two hours later, I came to a final decision on the new color scheme for Asymptote Design, and here it is to the left of the old, crappy color scheme:

So far the blue has been going really well with the whole space theme of the new site and I can’t wait to show my new brand to everyone later this year!

Tags: branding, design, redesign

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 4:10 am and is filed under branding, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.