HayoBethlehem.nl V14
Can you believe the last design was already seven years old? It was time for a change. I spent a few weeks working on this website, and finally, the results are in.
New branding
In 2013 I was still a full-time web designer, working as a front-end architect on www.anwb.nl. Then I made the career switch to Business Analyst, and mostly left the webdesign world behind. Yet I still wanted to maintain some of my skills, and I actually really like tinkering with my website. So I set out to realign my profile, and the branding with it.
As I no longer consider myself a designer, I didn't feel the need any more to design my own style. Instead, I used my network to get something done by a properly specialised professional. After searching I fell in love with the unique style of Haelsum, a boutique design agency run by an old classmate from my time at Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam.
Jantine pleasantly surprised me with her very professional and structured approach to the design process. She had a great way of explaining her design choices, and found a way to implement her signature style in a design for a subject that was markedly different from her usual projects. We went for a very high-end business like style, reminiscent of watch makers and banks. We decided to get rid of the old HB letter mark. On Jantine's advice we put the focus on my first name, as a more personal choice.
The style is meant to convey a new level of professionalism, commensurate with my current level of employment.
Simplification
The website was fairly easy to adapt. I prefer my "Russian agricultural" coding technique, where I try to keep CSS and HTML implementations as robust as possible. This leads to very light weight code. As there was very little cleaning up to do in that area, I decided to focus on simplifying the various elements and standardising the various views. Here's an overview of the major changes:
- All graphics are now SVG files;
- Improved readability through font sizes and removal of side bars;
- All teaser blocks now use the same code;
- Added a services section, as I intend to sell some of my skills in the future;
- Various performance tweaks that took my homepage up to a 100% Google lighthouse score;
- Added a basic random gallery slider on the photography page;
- Rewrote the box model to use Flex-box instead of floats;
- Streamlined automatic template publishing through gitlab.
