curiousrhino.com

The Background

I have been doing bits of design and development work on a hobby basis for about the last 4-5 years. It has always provided me with something other than Uni or Work to think about in my free time, and has allowed me to pick up several skills that I wouldn’t have now if it weren’t for all my tinkering around with applications such as Adobe Illustrator. Even then I’ve only really been using Illustrator frequently for about the last 18 months, before that I was all for pixel based editors such as Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro.

Over the last 4-5 years I had been putting the name “433design” against all my design work, this name stemmed from a website I was running at the time (hrt433.com). It was really for not other reason than I wanted something other then just my name to ‘attach’ to things. Late last year I freshened up 433design with a new logo, and did myself up a new invoice template to match, but this as as far as I got.

On and off for about the last year I have considering a name change for 433design. I wanted something that could be used to cover more than just design work, especially since I am doing increasingly more development/code work such as my Wordpress themes and more recently my Hahlo webapp for the iPhone. The search began.

The Name

I only really had three requirements for the name. It had to available as a .com domain name, it had to be a little quirky, and it had to allow me the opportunity for a cool logo, which was something that “433design” always lacked.

Like many I ended up getting drawn into the fascination of the adjective-noun naming convention, and to be perfectly honest with you I actually think its not too bad. so long as you can find a combination that hasn’t already been taken.

In this case I decided on the rhino part first, mainly because I had been ‘doodling’ in class and has drawn up a pretty cool picture of one. The hard part was finding the adjective to go with it. Just about every one I tried was already taken, and I didn’t want to end up with a huge URL, so things like narcolepticrhino were out of the question. As you can very well see I ended up settling on curiousrhino, I really would have liked something a little shorter, but I’m still happy with it.

The Structure, The Planning, The Work

With curiousrhino being a one man show, I have to try and explain how I break up a task, such as building this site, into into areas such as design, development and content. I’m the first to admit that I have trouble completing a design before I want to start coding it, but in this case I tried my hardest to make sure that the basis of the design was complete before I started fumbling around with the code to make it all work.

But before I could get to the design I needed to work out what I was going to put on this site and how I was going to organise it. I’m thinking of this site a an online portfolio, somewhere where I can showcase a lot of my work while keeping it separate from the less professional side of things. Due to an established user base etc, I don’t think I would ever move all the information and downloads etc over from deanjrobinson.com to here, but more likely (as I have done so far) just put up a ‘project page’ which is a general overview, tells people what its about, what it does and where they can get it.

In addition to the projects and portfolio there is the blog (which you’re reading at this very moment), and the plan in the future is to use it to publish articles and/or tutorials on subjects related to the design and development work that I do. With every job I do I just about always learn something new, or find a better, quicker way of doing something. These are the sorts of things that should be shared with others, at least thats how I feel.

With the rough ’site map’ done, I started work on the layouts, I knew that I wanted the ‘home’ page to be a kind of overview page. It would need to pull in the latest bits from each section (blog, portfolio and projects). I also knew from the start that I want to the portfolio to be like an image gallery.

So I knew what I wanted on the pages, but I still didn’t have a finished log or colour to work with for a design, so I had to switch hats for a moment and go back and finish working on the branding side of things. Using the rough sketch of a rhino that I had drawn previously as a guide I drew up the ‘rhino’ logo in Illustrator. It received several tweaks before I was happy with it. I had already decided that I wanted to use the same type face, Walkway, as I was using for the logo on deanjrobinson.com to create a visual link between the two.

For colours I ended up settling for a series of bluey-greys, in all shades from light right through to dark. With this I now had the basic building blocks to begin work on the design.

After many hours wasted doing designs I really didn’t like I ended up doing the basics of the final design in about 15 minutes. I’m not sure what it was but for some reason this layout worked and the others (which weren’t too different really) just looked strange. Maybe it was late. I knocked up a couple of mockups in Illustrator before starting work on the code…

To try and speed up the process, and to make updating content as easy as possible I’m using Wordpress for the base of the site, with my own custom built ‘theme’ on top. Without getting incredibly technical and boring, I am using a built in feature of Wordpress called custom fields to store and display things such as the thumbnails for the portfolio and the images for the projects. While Wordpress is traditionally a ‘blogging engine’ I am using it as more of a general content management system. I’m also using it because I am comfortable with it and know what it can and can’t do.

A lot of the coding time was spent trying to get the right things to display in the right place. Usually problems were caused either by errors in the code, or errors in the cascading style sheets. But in almost every case the problem was able to be solved without too much stress. One feature that I have added in is on display in the “portfolio”, when you click on a thumbnail the background will darken, and the full image will appear. This is a simple piece of javascript known as “lightbox”, its a nice little thing to give that extra bit of ’shine’, and it much nice than popup windows.

After I got the basis of the custom Wordpress template done I started work on the content. This is where the design/development/content lines start to blend together…again. As I started adding content, I would find things I had hadn’t completely catered for in the design, or once parts of the design were coded I would find a better way of doing things which would require parts of the design to be redone. I ended up going in circles a couple of times, but in the end its all turned out ok.

Writing/sourcing all the content actually took up a lot more time that I was expecting. I did give me an opportunity to dig through a bunch of old design work to find some examples to put up in the portfolio and I stumbled across somethings that I had completely forgotten about which was nice. Some of the work also gave a good indication about how my skills have developed over the past few years, in some aspects I’m still doing the same thing, in others I’m doing things 10 times better. Its nice to realise that I have made some really good progress.

The End and The Beginning

The end of this initial build of curiousrhino.com signals a few things. The end of my last University assignment. The end of my last University Course (assuming no failures). The end of my fourth and final year of University. The end of 433design, and the beginning of curiousrhino.