bad robot brain

It’s not exactly out with the old, but I am trying something new—a new domain name and a fresh new design to go along with it. Like every web designer I get bored of my personal site design almost immediately after launching it. Truth be told, you’re lucky that there’s even a site to look at at all because by the time I finish one I want to start all over again. This is exactly the position that I found myself in late last year. I started getting that old familiar itch, that little voice was nagging at me to freshen up Proj: The Repository a little bit. While I was trying to figure out what to do with the ol’ site next I sat down and had a real good think about where it is and where I’d like it to go. Out of that think tank came two immediate criteria and another that may or may not see the light of day. The two primary focuses being:

1. I want to blog—as much as I hate the word “blog” and despite the pundits claiming that the blog is dead, I am not quite ready to give up the ghost . Sure, there’s Twitter for spouting nonsense whenever you want, and I am all for it, but sometimes you need to communicate more than what 140 characters will allow you to.
2. I want an online portfolio. I am proud of the work I do, and have felt that I have been without a sufficient way to showcase this work for a long time. I know-I know, there are a ton of free site like Coroflot for showcasing your work, but I wanted something I could control. Besides, I always forget which sites I’ve posted work to, and having to update more than one online portfolio is a total pain.

The Name

Probably the biggest change here is the domain name, BadRobotBrain.com. I’ve been kicking around the idea of retiring Proj-tr.com for quite some time. Mostly because it means next to nothing to anyone besides me, it doesn’t roll off the tongue very easily, and I got a bit tired of explaining it.

The criteria for the new name was pretty simple, it had to sound fun, with a little bit of my personality mixed in to boot. Something that would work well for my current objectives and has the potential to work with projects I have in mind for the future. I had started tossing around quite a few idea amongst my-selves starting in late 08/early 09. Crossing names off the list for one reason or another—mostly because it’s hard to find a good URL that isn’t already taken. Luckily, I had Jim handy via IM for this process. I’m sure he never got tired of me blurting out names until one finally stuck. Eventually I landed on BadRobotBrain.com, a name that is—to me at least—a little ironic, a little improbable, and a touch kitch.

The Design

At the same time I was trying to come up with a new name I was mulling over the design. After pouring over design galleries, magazines, and books I put pen to paper, or more accurately pointer to pixel and roughed out a couple ideas that will likely never see the light of day. It was also at this same time that my coworkers began talking about starting an internal blog here at Snitily Carr. Something that would allow us to share articles and tips & tricks throughout our department instead of the dozens of emails that get sent out and forgotten in short order.

Knowing that our internal blog—or intrablog if you will—wasn’t going to be a profitable gig, I surfed around for a WordPress template that could get the job done with a minimum time investment. That’s when I came across the Magazeen Theme developed by Function for Smashing Magazine. After setting Magazeen up for my department and liking what I came out with, I got the idea to customize this theme for my own purposes.

It might seem like cheating for a designer/developer to use a template for the basis of their own site, and to some extent I would agree with you. Using someone elses design/code and taking full credit for the wiz-bangary is totally cheap, but there is nary a line of css nor an html file in this theme that I haven’t touched, hacking it up and shifting it about until I came out with something that works for me. All in all, it was a great learning experience for me, I feel like I’ve quadrupled my WordPress theming skills by having had a solid foundation to start off with.

So, the first thing to do was to tweak the look of the theme to something more fitting my personality. I stayed true to my own design preference with the grungy header graphic/logo. Then decided to shake things up a bit from where I had usually gone with my previous themes—I injected some bright colors into the mix. If you’ve ever seen a printer’s logo you’ll probably catch on to what I’ve done, injecting bright blues, yellows and magentas over the black background to pay homage to the fact that I am currently living with one foot in the world of print design. It sounds a little cheesy when I say it out loud, but that’s where my head was. I was also mindful not to overdo the textures so I tried to keep most of the page’s elements on the slicker side—which contrasts nicely with the grungey header.

What I liked the most about the Magazeen theme is that it makes it so easy for readers to dig deeper into the site through the Category Drop-Down menu at the end of the featured posts—which I compliment with a Related Post plugin at the end of full posts—and the Recent Posts widget on the sidebar. I also hope to encourage a little more back and forth between myself and readers by using the Recent Comments widget along the sidebar.

In addition to encouraging readers to delve deeper, I’d like to encourage them to share anything that they’d found interesting on BadRobotBrain, which I’ve done by adding the Tweet This button at the top as well as the Sociable plugin at the bottom of full posts.

The Portfolio

One of the most important components of this re-envisioning of my personal brand is the portfolio. As I said before, I’m proud of the work that I do and want to share it with whomever wants to see it. So one thing I tried really hard to do was to design/augment my theme in such a way that it could work for both blogging and displaying my work.

To achieve this end I spent a bit of time getting familiar with the TimThumb script that was built into the Magazeen theme to get the thumbnails that this script generates to look proportionate and not cropped all weird. I also used the Cleaner Gallery and WP-Lytebox plugins to handle the spiffy Lightbox effect for thumbnail images within the post.

The great thing I’m noticing about using WordPress to run my portfolio is that the blog format encourages me to continually add pieces whether it’s brand new or kind of old. That said, my portfolio isn’t nearly full yet. I have quite a bit of work to add to it, so be on the look out for some more Fresh Ink.

Well, I think that’s all I have to say about the new site, other than all of the original posts from Proj-tr.com are now available on BadRobotBrain.com/blog. They aren’t all formatted correctly yet, so expect to find some broken/mis-sized images for the time being. I am working on getting these updated as quickly as possible. In the mean time why not subscribe to my portfolio and blog feeds and keep up with all of the latest happenings.