Hat Head Studios

The big experiment

March 25th, 2009 at 5:30 pm by Michael Mahoney

“Why does your site look like this?!”

…I hear you yell. Well, here’s the deal. The old site at hatheadstudios.com was getting old. Really old. And outdated.

And boring.

But, I never get a chance to create a new site, because I’m always working on client projects. So, I decided to give myself a hard, panic-driven deadline of right now, which is probably the only way that a new site is going to get made.

I’ve got some great ideas, and the end result should be a site which is much more useful and easier for me to update. I’d like for you all to be able to see my latest web design work, of which I’m really proud, and my latest photography projects, which are also pretty fun.

And I’m going to do the whole thing from scratch. Like baking a pie starting from soil. OK, not exactly from soil, but at least from flour–none of these pre-baked crusts for me. If this metaphor seems a little abstruse to you, here’s what I mean: I’m going to create my new site as a custom Wordpress template. This is the way I do many of my clients’ sites, and it’s a great way to make a website which can be kept relevant. A lot of time creating Wordpress themes involves starting from a theme some other developer has created and sculpting it into a different shape by modifying its images, stylesheets, php functions and template files. (more…)

A little typography

April 7th, 2009 at 5:09 pm by Michael Mahoney

I decided step one should be to at least give the site a small amount of structure and typographic niceness. It’s probably all going to change, but at least it’s readable now.

Even less design, but more structure

April 7th, 2009 at 10:47 am by Michael Mahoney

What kind of designer tries to remove all the design from his website?

The kind who’s also a developer. My goal here is to get as close to zero as I can with the design of the site, and then begin building it in the way that I want from the ground up.

But, I realized after the initial post here that I was actually still making some assumptions about the basic design, and I want to get rid of even those. However, in the meantime, I also found out about the Carrington CMS theme framework, and more than any other framework I’ve seen so far, this one seemed a very logical extension of Wordpress’s existing theming structure. Plus, they have developed a version for developers which removes all the markup, leaving me with a wonderful structure, but no design.

Perfect.

So, after also applying a complete CSS reset, this site now looks as plain as it can possibly look. A complete blank slate, but thanks to Carrington, a blank slate with infinite potential.