Posts from Design

BMW US Manufacturing Gets Redesigned

Working on a brand as prestigious as BMW really makes me excited to be a designer. While I was involved in the last BMW redesign process, this time around I played a much larger role in the overall direction of the website.

One of the biggest challenges with the new redesign was the number of orphaned pages throughout the site. When the site was in flex it allowed us to add a lot of useful tidbits of content without having them actually live in any particular section. When moving out of flex, we wanted to create a more structured navigation. The JMG team worked very closely with the client on minimizing the amount of clicks the user had to make to navigate around the site.

Web Design Inspiration

"We need a layout for this page in a few hours. I don’t have the copy yet; I’m not sure everything that’s going on the page, but I need it done ASAP. Thanks."

Does this sound familiar? As a designer this kind of thing happens A LOT, and it's not exactly the best setup to get your creative juices flowing. Luckily, I've found a few strategies that provide me with consistent sources of inspiration – even for those "hair on fire" situations.

2010 Redesign Launch

In the past, I've tried to redesign my site about once a year and I've been able to stay on this schedule up until 2009. The redesign process started on track and everything was going according to plan until I came across and became enfatuated with grid based designs.

Designing on a grid allowed me to layout my content in a much more structured manner. Typically, when I began a new design, I would layout certain elements where they felt right. I've always been anal about sections being equal widths and counting pixels to make sure everything was perfect. In a way I was designing on a grid without realizing it.

Launching a New Design

I try and re-design my website every year to keep it fresh and up-to-date. Obviously some years the design and development process goes faster than others and this year was no exception.

I was planning on launching my new site on January 1st, but as you can tell that didn’t happen. I was fortunate enough to hook up with another local company here in Greenville that needed a pretty regular front-end developer, so I am glad to say that the re-design didn’t get launched because I was incredibly busy.

Let us all celebrate like them!

A few years back I wasn’t aware of these redesigning of logos on different occasions until one fine day I randomly opened my Google homepage and got to know its Halloween.

This is guest post from Ben Johnson of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in UK.