At the beginning of 2010, rare pattern was relaunched with a new look, designed and implemented by Laura herself.
The Challenge
Because of time constraints, Laura's blog had sported a default Drupal theme for over a year. As a designer, she wanted a blog that reflected her own aesthetic, not only to make the site more visually appealing, but also to lend credibility to her many blog posts on design. The time had come to bring the blog's visuals to life.
What We Did
She created an overarching design in Adobe Illustrator, emulating a technique she uses in many of her pen illustrations. Yet the site is more than just a graphic. Designed using the 960 design grid system, the embraces a structure for easy implementation. This afforded the ability to complete the project with minimal time investment. (The client work always comes first.)
The rare pattern theming was able to build off of existing design patterns and the 960 grid. Developed naturally as a sub-theme of the Drupal NineSixty theme, front-end development took just a few days total ... including design tweaks and adjustments made on the live xhtml and CSS.
On the back-end, we implemented a system for easy association of images with blog posts, leveraging jQuery Lightbox functionality to provide pop-up expansion of smaller images.
Results
Laura is very happy with the results (even if she does say so herself).
