The journey towards achieving the devchix theme.

Emergence of the blog —
Nola hooked us up a few months back and devChix members are now entitled to post and share ideas with the world via this blog using the Word Press blogging engine. This was our very first intro post from Liz, one of our Perl girls, and then everything came rolling in. Yay! The initial theme was screaming pink (Leone by Andiz) and served its purpose well. But surely, back in everyone’s mind was the wish to have a look and feel that we can call our own.

The beginnings –
Back in September of 2006 immediately after the launch of the devChix blog, one of our lovable members, Victoria proposed some logo ideas for devChix. We all picked the girl with the beaming radio glow. Four days later, I helped enhance Victoria’s great idea with this devChix logo set using funny lip spoofs. We were all excited, threw in all our ideas and concerns like too much red lipstick, or not enough girlishness or too much of it. Of course this was a back and forth dialog with women! Then majority wanted a code/programming element within the logo so here came another set. In this last set, we have four variations: the matrix-adapted 1s and 0s feel, the radio beaming glow effect, the simple #hash element and the vertical numerics. Suffice it to say, Neo’s camp won.

After the holidays –
We’re all awol due to the holidays. That’s fully understandable. We nudged and chugged with a few post for events and things some of our talented folks have been getting into. It’s different now. About a week ago, everyone is pitching in and volunteering to post on allotted scheduled times. Thanks to this rekindled enthusiasm, I was engaged and prompted to contribute. I have the devChix logo, which I’ll use to influence the design of the theme.

Theme in early stages —
Using the logo, I tried to get a simple look. This was the beginning of my first comp/mock-up. It didn’t feel right. It had the look of “a cotton-candy-sky-world met screaming blue”. Oh no! from screaming pink to screaming blue! I stopped cause this is not the path I want. I took a break and leveled my hunter. Wow is a good distraction for me at least. While I was riding the gryph, it hit me that I was seeing a lot of different colors. Colors! I came back to the drawing board. The first comp was missing contrast. I could use bold colors with a subtle presentation. Err! Yah! Now I have the colors dealt with. Then came rounded or edged? (That’s such a 2003 question). The quick addition to outdated things of sorts was swirls and warping and an illustration feel. From simple to funky, spicy and hot - my second comp.

Get friends/or not friends to critique your work –
I am by no means a full time designer (nor great) but I know my way around Photoshop and I am very handy with CSS. I do coding most of the time too with Coldfusion and PHP. I love doing both design and code! But I learned that in order to make pretty things useful, you need to have someone ruthlessly nitpick the design. Feedback, good or bad, is your best friend. Listen to the points raised and evaluate it by trade if they’re valid. The feedback I got was that my colors are now too dark and readability is an issue. With a simple color swap - this is my third comp. A total of 26.9 KB for 15 image files, a 2kb css file and this skeleton mark-up, that last comp is now converted to fit a new Word Press template to get the same look.

I hope I also achieved an easy way finding route for our navigation versus our old category set up that looked so clunky. I look forward to the days when we’re able to work on code and design our own apps here at devChix. Cross-fingers!

Work on validations –
It occurs to me that the site can’t validate when content is mashed into the template. That’ll be the tweaking part I hope to smooth in the following days.

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Thanks to devChix for the opportunity to play. I had fun putting the theme together and thank you for stopping by! /rockon

2/20 8:25 am
Fixed known OmniWeb, Safari and Camino Search Box render issues. Thanks to J. Rentzsch for the screen shots!

This blog entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Design process, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.