The TH Design Blog!

At a recent meeting with a new client, a request to share my thoughts about logo samples (provided by another designer) under consideration for the client’s new business identity prompted a mini-lecture on my part about the design discipline of typography. While not delving into some of the more arcane aspects of typography, I did touch on a few topics non-designers never consider much less encounter during the course of their lives.

On the drive home after the meeting, I began to think about how we are awash in an ocean of typography yet, paradoxically, its ubiquitous presence renders it (in a sense) invisible to the public at large. I realized to even broach the topic of typography, to indicate letter forms have a history and are designed for specific purposes or to evoke or convey certain moods, feelings, associations is—for most people—to cross into the realm of providing too much information. Sometimes, a simple “that doesn’t work” or “it looks nice” is all the information a client really wants (or needs).

Our decision to move to WordPress as a platform for designing and building dynamic websites was, in retrospect, one of the most enjoyable business decisions we’ve ever made.

The first step, of course, was learning the platform, and we did that through the mechanism of designing and building our new website. This presented a series of learning curves and each learning curve had it’s moments of frustration, the occasional “this will never work” low spot, and several “holy cow, this is so cool!!!” epiphanies.

Building websites from scratch requires a synthesis of several knowledge sets and each knowledge set has it’s own intricacies. Then, when you step into a specific platform you have to learn it’s intricacies, and then re-synthesize your previous knowledge with the new way of doing things.  You find yourself dreaming about code and glowing viewports and realize your mind is working feverishly to put it all together.

But there really is nothing like the satisfaction you experience when you conquer something challenging. Priceless.

Thanks for stopping by to visit our new, still-something-of-a-work-in-progress site. As we become more familiar with the WordPress platform, we will be tweaking things here and there, re-arranging and re-writing content and adding new features and functions.

When we embarked on a re-design of our site back in August, we had several goals in mind not the least of which was to incorporate a blog feature where we could, on a regular basis, share our thoughts about the entire panoply of issues relevant to graphic design. Since Adobe’s decision to abandon GoLive in the spring of 2008 meant we were (eventually) going to have to switch to another web authoring/development tool (and Adobe’s Dreamweaver didn’t exactly set our hearts aglow), we began to consider open source content management platforms like Joomla, Drupal, WebsiteBaker, etc., as potential replacements for GoLive. We were familiar with WordPress as a blogging platform, but did not realize the program had evolved to the point where it could be used to author multi-page static and dynamic websites. Hence, since our website was in dire need of a re-design and upgrade (plus, we wanted the all-important blog feature), we decided to take the plunge and dove head first into the WordPress pool.

One of the primary challenges we faced when beginning the re-design project was learning how to build and incorporate our own WordPress theme (i.e., template). Over the past six weeks we’ve had to familiarize ourselves with basic PHP programming and the WordPress structure to bring our design to fruition. The path to completion has been strewn with the usual obstacles and frustrations of finding and fixing and/or modifying coding to make things work properly. At times it seemed we had bitten off far more than we could chew, but as the new site goes “live,” we’re becoming more excited about how we can use WordPress to build great, dynamic sites for our clients that incorporate many new, innovative web technologies and functionality.