Haulix Website Design - Sketch to Production

With our latest website design, I took a slightly different approach. When I began the process, which was about a week ago, we had a Crowdspring logo project being worked on parallel to the website design.

As the logo was being created, I started out by looking at random websites on the net. Like a sponge, I wanted to soak up as many ideas as possible and convert that to inspiration, which I could then mix with my own expertise. After about an hour of browsing, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. I grabbed a fat black marker and a piece of paper. I slid the keyboard to the side and started sketching. At this point, it's semi-high level design.

As I was sketching, I changed my mind on a few things, hence the scribbles. This sketch literally took no more than ten minutes and then I was ready to jump into Adobe Fireworks and start mocking this thing up.

Although we were pretty strict with the color combinations we wanted, a few artists submitted logos with alternate choices and at first, they influenced my design. We never used red before, so I gave it a try with a rough logo that a designer submitted at Crowdspring. I wanted to see if his logo would work with our design. Here is what I came up with.

From there the team here discussed each area of the design. We ended up cutting a lot of stuff out and adding a few new things at the same time. After sleeping on the color red, we had second thoughts and went back to our original color scheme. After a few more mockups and discussions, we ended up going with this design and logo. The logo took about a week to get designed and the website was done in about two to three days.  The third day, I sliced up the design and wired it up in an ASP.NET MasterPage with CSS driving layout.