Welcome to the first post of my new design blog
Design captures everything I love including illustration, typography, packaging and social engagement. This new design blog is set up as a place to keep all my daily writing about my design journey – a journal of my creative endeavors and influences, sharing information and discovering new things.
Why did I make the changes? / Cindy Cheung / CCH Design
First of all, if you have ever visited my site before then hopefully you will notice quite a big change in the design, look and feel, content and colour scheme. For those of you who have never been here before: the background is now off-white, is heavily design portfolio ‘content’ driven rather than Flash-led and Missie Cindz food-focused. It was important for me not to loose sight of my main profession as a Designer.
I have been very hard at work designing my own WordPress Theme from scratch for several months now – a massive thank you to Martin Frost, a very talented freelance web developer from Sheffield (follow Martin – @fronbow). Martin has built my new portfolio site and wrote all the code, customised and understood all my web visuals and tweaks. You are absolutely amazing. You have pulled this entire thing together in a small amount of time and are a master at what you do. I am so grateful and it’s been a real pleasure to work with you. Thank you!
This decision was actually quite a hard one to make, for the past year I have been heavily wrapped up in Missie Cindz and proactively blogging about Sheffield and its food scene. It made better sense to have the two projects – my design service and food blog separate and to have two different identities. I have been wanting to make the redesign since forever – it’s surprising how quickly portfolio pieces get outdated. Martin has taught me the importance of a good ‘Layout’ – the layout of the new site and as with everything in this redesign is all about focus – the featured case studies. I also now have a visual hierarchy now as a way to lead users through my page.
Styling, pixel pushing and WordPress cooking
So what’s different? I hear you ask. Lots. This is a bespoke WordPress theme, that I designed and Martin Frost created so it isn’t available elsewhere.
New logo: I really wanted to design a logo that was recognisable and tells people instantly what I do and who I am. I focused on a simple and clean approach to the design. Colours and font type have remained the same for consistency.
Focus: this site is now entirely focused on my design portfolio and services – what I do. The whole process has been quite a challenge, especially when it comes to reducing the site to only what is really needed, fighting the urge to add in elements which I think ultimately wouldn’t really add anything to the overall site.
Updated Portfolio: use of big high-quality images, clearly accessible to the user.
Blog: a blog is always a good idea – allowing me to blog about my area of expertise; showing and sharing information to readers about what I am doing and the things that inspire me. The blog also helps promote my services and prevents my website from lying static. I’ve enabled comments for feedback. I’ve not made users register to add a comment to the blog – which would only turn people off from commenting.
I think that’s the key point I’ve taken away from this design, throughout a design I think you should always stop and ask yourself: ‘why is that there?’ or ‘what purpose does that have?’ – if you can’t think of a good enough reason then chances are it doesn’t need to be there! I am always interested to hear your views. I am always learning and keen to keep it that way.
The amazing minds and talents and skills that assisted me on this endeavor certainly need to be acknowledged for all their patience, hard work and fierce creativity – you’re all simply, NOM-ful people to be working with.
