Echo Faith Redesign or: Where’s the Blue?

Welcome to the new Echo Faith — j5.

I’ve been stressing about this redesign for a long time, knowing that once it was live I was going to see a lot of it. As you may notice, this does not match the teaser design screenshots I posted back in October 2007. My idea was to create a new look that featured my designs and art without and let that be the shining part of the site. I redesigned and re-redesigned this idea way too many times and was never quite happy with it… it was just too simple and plain for me.

So I went back to the drawing board a bit and decided to try punching out a cool textured design with more of a muted color so that the sidebar mini-portfolio images would still pop. My wife, Danielle, gave me lots of great critical feedback to help me narrow in on what was working and what wasn’t. My hope is that the critical aspect of the sidebar images will motivate me to create more compelling pieces so the sidebar is fresh..

With this redesign I have made the switch from Wordpress to Expression Engine. I’d like to say the process was smooth and easy, but it most assuredly was not! Though much of that was likely due to my severe lack of knowledge about how Expression Engine works. I can already tell that I will definitely be much happier with Expression Engine - the flexibility is huge. Once I figure it all out this will be my CMS of choice for most of my future projects, except those on the real cheap (EE licenses are not free, except for the core license).

Major props to Michael Boyink both for an amazing series of Expression Engine tutorials and for responding whenever I ranted or complained about something with EE on Twitter. Echo Faith j5 was also transitioned to the fantastic new 960 Grid System but the extremely talented Nathan Smith.

To fully enjoy the redesign please view in Safari… text-shadow = win.

I hope you like it.