Well, here we stand at the soft opening of a new portfolio design. It seems that this thing happens about every six months. While I loved the previous design, it really didn’t allow for much expansion. It was all one long page, which wouldn’t really work in the long run. Updating the portfolio content involved a lot of copy and paste and uploading files. So it was time to try starting from scratch with a content management system. Having worked with it a lot in the paste on other projects, I decided to have it a go with building my entire portfolio site around WordPress. I absolutely find it a joy working with WordPress, there is so much flexibility beyond building a simple blog. This also gave me an opportunity to try a fresh new look for the site, breaking away from the traditional sky blue and spectrum of colors.
Enter SmithScott.Net
I have also decided to drop the Silver Box Design moniker. When I first came up with that name about three years ago, I knew it was to be temporary until I thought of something better. All along, I really just wanted my name, Scott Smith, as the domain. However, since my name is so common, is a little difficult. So after a long time finding the right combination of first, last, and top level domain names, I landed on smithscott.net.
Change bookmarks accordingly, please.
On the new aesthetic
The Silver Box symbolism, I’ll admit, was never very original. I had started using the cut-out “S” for a few months now, and luckily this is also my initals. Perfect match by accident.
I also wanted to experiment with a new color palette and opted for a shade of gray complimented with yellows, blues, and greens.
I have also begun experimenting with the TypeKit service that helps bring non-standard fonts to the web. It’s a really wonderful service that I may write about in more detail down the road. Currently, I am using League Gothic for the large titles and navigation along with Etica Display for the blog titles.
The orange comes from my desire to celebrate my home state, California (which is featured on the home page as well). Southern California, particularly the inland areas, was once a major hub of the citrus industry in the US. I grew up seeing a lot of orange crate labels in my house and had my German ancestors settle in Orange County with their orange groves many generations before me. So it is something to celebrate, even if it doesn’t exactly tie into modern day web design.
No Comments
Also on this blog, I have not chosen to allowing commenting on posts. This is by design. I’d rather you drop me a direct line rather than litter my front lawn, so to speak.
Enjoy!
I hope you like this new layout. I sure do. I plan to update this blog about once a week with posts mainly about design and technology. Elsewhere, you may still read my personal blog over at Tumblr and follow me on Twitter over here.
