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sometimes you know something but don’t want to admit it to yourself. it can be something you see every day but you conveniently stash it away in the ‘voluntary ignorance’ portion of your brain. maybe you ignore it because if you acknowledge it, you’ll have to deal with it. maybe you ignore it because if you acknowledge it, you would basically be admitting that you had failed at something in the past.
after numerous therapy sessions and sorting through the various psychological aspects of the situation, i recently made the admission i’ve been avoiding for almost two years: my blueflash website has been hit really hard with the ugly stick. have you seen it? it was bad. it looked like it was geared toward videogame playing teenage boys. it was dark (black, to be specific), with blueflash written out in blue graffiti chalk letters at the top. check out the landing page below (there was a slideshow in the big blank spot below the header).
the about page had a picture of my reflection inside of my friend allyssa’s sunglasses, the contact page had a picture of an empty phone booth, and the pricing page was a mess of plain text next to irrelevant photos of random stuff. did i mention it was dark and claustrophobia-inducing? it was.
with prodding from my wife and some help from a future blueflash bride who happens to be a graphic designer, i’ve overhauled the website and am very happy with the look and feel of it compared to its previous state.
my favorite new part of the website is the revamped ‘about’ page. i shot the photo of myself in the basement with my studio lights, tripod, and a white bed sheet for a background. i then brought myself into photoshop and cut away the background, leaving just yours truly. the next step is a very advanced graphic design technique – to create the notebook paper background, i executed the following procedure:
1) got a piece of notebook paper
2) wrote on the piece of notebook paper
3) crumpled up the piece of notebook paper
4) un-crumpled the piece of notebook paper
5) scanned the piece of notebook paper
i then dropped me onto the scanned image in photoshop and looked at the final product with a satisfied feeling. there were some detours along the way, like first creating this picture of me, me, me, me, me, me, and me.
i added a form on the ‘contact’ page so people can directly send a message. now people don’t have to go ALL the way to their webmail to contact blueflash. if laziness was a deterrent in contacting blueflash in the past, let it be no more. the portfolio landing page got a facelift, each category getting a sporty little photo to represent it.
i also did some not so obvious things, like overhauled all three portfolios and getting them totally updated. i kicked out some old pictures that didn’t belong in there anymore while i was at it. i updated the clientspace section to get that totally up to date, too.
i’d love it if you could spend a little bit of time and poke around the new site. feedback is awesome, good or bad. it’d be super helpful to hear your opinion(s) so i can improve it even more. leave a comment on the blog or use the handy dandy new contact form on the website to let me know what you’re thinking. thanks!
