Arcane Palette Creative Design | portfolio | Finding M

Finding M is an exciting new project that we’re thrilled to be involved in. Because of the nature of the site, we can’t really go into the coolest parts of the site. But what we can say is that the original goal was to create an artistic, minimalist, experimental blog design for an artist, with functionality integrated for video blogs and social networking.

After playing with a few different ideas that still included a sidebar, we ultimately decided to drop the sidebar and move everything that would have gone there to other parts of the screen. It’s been so long since we’ve designed a site with no sidebar at all, that used 100% of the screen, that it was really liberating to be able to take advantage of that much space. We used a disjointed layout for the blog posts that creates a staircase effect and draws your eyes down the screen. The site has almost no graphics at all, and the colors are stark black and white. I like the look of the white text inside a black box, and used that for links and headings.

Something we wanted to add in was unique, customized author pages, which is a rarely used feature of WordPress. The site is going to have multiple authors, so the author pages we built allow site visitors to not only see posts by that author, but also learn more about each author and where to find that author online.

For the titles on single-posts and pages, we did something a little different. Something that I really liked at the time and have thought about and wantedto play with ever since is some of the crazy CSS effects used by 42 Entertainment on sites like ILoveBees and Year Zero’s ArtIsResistance (among others). We took a similar approach but applied it just to the page titles, which gives the illusion of a distorted or destroyed typeface when in fact, it’s just one type, the same Helvetica/Ariel used on the rest of the site. The effect was done by layering several versions of the same heading with slightly different positioning, sizes, effects, and colors. It adds an edge and uncertainty that fits with the theme of the site.

I’ve thought a lot about typographic designs for a while but haven’t had the opportunity to explore the ideas. This project is a lot of fun because it let us play with those ideas and explore the boundaries of commonly accepted norms for website layout.

WordPress plugins used: Audio Player, Exclude Pages, flickrRSS, Shutter Reloaded, SimplePie, WP-o-Matic