BrenéBrown.com Gets A Bright, Fresh Look

Due to a lot of travel since the latter part of July, at least a lot as far as I am used to, I was unable to post about my latest project with Brené Brown. We re-worked her original website design with an eye to "more white space, more clarity, and increased simplicity through mindful integration", and I believe we achieved what we set out to accomplish.

First, we worked on the entry page to her website, which helped us to set the tone for what we would find inside:



Then, we worked on her website's general template. We retained most of her original masthead pictured below:



But we reworked it to decrease its height, remove the text along the skyline, and add the two birds and a vintage photo frame:



The new site is a bright, fresh take on her original design, so it still feels home to her long-time readers while still being a step forward into the new academic year:



If you are not already familiar with Brené and her work, make sure that you drop in on BrenéBrown.com and take a tour. She is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, a nationally renowned speaker, an author, and the recipient of numerous teaching awards.

Brené Brown does work worth sharing, and I am so honoured to have been able to help her do just that.

A New Look For The Well-Read Wife

Dawn Blanchfield and I teamed up again to create a new look for The Well-Read Wife. I designed the masthead:



And Dawn tweaked the layout and the background with her WordPress wizardry.

That gorgeous photo in the masthead was taken by the talented Mishelle Lane of Secret Agent Mama, and it was the simplicity of this beautiful photo that inspired the rest of the piece. Thank you, Mishelle!

To see the whole new look, head on over to The Well-Read Wife and check it out. She's looking all purdy, if I do say so myself.

SuzRocks Rocks With A Little Help From Her Friends

Suz came to me for a masthead design for SuzRocks through the presently-on-hiatus Sweet Blog Design, and, while her needs were challenging, I do love a good challenge. Her list of image must-haves was not for the feint of heart — a world or globe, a mountain range, someone climbing a mountain, an army nurse corp logo, and an EKG tracing, all within the same masthead — and, luckily, my heart is not feint. I dove right in.



While I created the masthead, Dawn Blanchfield worked on the page layout and coding wizardry, marrying our work together beautifully. Thank you, Dawn.

And thank you, Suz, for being so good to work with and giving me a good challenge. My bald patches are growing in nicely now ;)

Go check out the new SuzRocks and see our work in action, because she likes it! She really likes it!

Megan Jordan's Velveteen Mind: Two Mastheads and a Twitter Background

I've been working with Megan Jordan of Velveteen Mind to update her weblog masthead from what it has been over the last four years.

We listened to her readers on Facebook, she shared images she liked with me via a private Posterous account, and we wrote back and forth, collaborating on ideas about her vision for her website, until we established mastheads we loved. I, of course, have been just itching to crow about it since we finished.

Voilà!



I also worked on a second masthead for the About page on Velveteen Mind. We wanted to carry the same look over from the original masthead while still creating a new look, so we switched out the original woman for a bathing beauty and the birds for blue crabs.



And then, because Megan wanted to carry the aesthetic across her web presence, I also created a Twitter background for her @VelveteenMind account.



I was so excited as everything was going live last night that I was bouncing up and down our hallway and giving the Palinode kisses on the top of his head while he tried to work.

Some people jump out of airplanes or climb mountains. Me? I thrill over a well-placed crab.