It’s been a while since I shared any recent work with you guys, and to be honest, it’s because this year has been slower than the previous years. Instead of working on four projects at once, I’ve been working on no more than two. It’s been a little strange, but I’ve been grateful for it since I’m balancing so many things. However, I’m thrilled to finally be sharing some more recent work, and this project is by far one of my new favorites!

If you’ve been following me for a while, and I do mean a while, then you might remember that I worked with Alex back in 2014 to create her branding and a blog design. It was a blast to work with her, so I was excited when I saw she had reached out to me earlier this year about potentially working together again.

Of course, that excitement doubled when I heard that she was still very happy with her branding. I still love the way it looks, as well, so it was nice to hear she wanted to keep it. After chatting back and forth via email for a while, we were originally just going to do a few updates to her blog design, but then we jumped on the phone and realized that a full redesign would be best.

The New Features

I won’t lie, when I worked with Alex in 2014 I was just really getting going with my business. I had a few years of experience, but I didn’t have that much experience with coding. That means that while her design looked and worked well, it wasn’t the best work I could have done. Combined with that, we both knew that the trends of fashion blogs have changed drastically since we last worked together, so we set forth with a list of features her site truly needed to keep up with her competition:

• Ditching the sidebar – This is a trend that a lot of people are going toward; heck, even I’ve been considering it for this site.
• 3-column call-to-action – Since we were ditching the sidebar, we still wanted to link the most important pages in a new way
• Refined menu that shows off content – I had never seen a mega menu before, but I agreed that it’s a great way to continue to let her content shine
• Updated footer – She had a really simple footer on her last design, so with this one we wanted to update it a bit

My design style has changed so much since we last worked together, and with all of the new blog features coming out, I was excited to get to work on such a different look than my previous work.

The new brand + blog design

As the new blog design came together, I couldn’t have been happier. We both knew we still liked the existing branding, but I swear the new design just makes it pop so much more than the previous one did. As for the blog design itself, I love it. It certainly stretched my coding ability in a few ways (I had to bring Krista in for a little bit of troubleshooting), but it turned out so well!

We added all of the features we had talked about plus a few extras like including the Shop the Post widget area on the main Blog page, creating a custom About page that shows off featured content, and creating a grid for her archive pages so her readers could quickly look through her older posts.

Overall, this project was an absolute dream, and I had such a blast that I’m just itching to get my hands on similar work.