If you’ve frequented the Echo Enduring Blog at all in the past (and I hope you have), you may notice that things are looking significantly different now. That, of course, is because I have finally launched the redesign that I have been talking about for the better part of eight months now. It was a long process, made longer by my own innate perfectionism, but I finally finished it and turned it live last night.

Now, you may have also noticed that when design blogs like this one introduce a new design, there is a common trend to post about the new design. So, that’s what I want to do in this article. Actually, what I want to do is take a very quick look at six of the key objectives that I set for myself when I started this redesign, and how I attempted to solve each problem.

Readability

If you remember the old design, I had a very dark background. In fact, it was black with (almost) white text. It looked kind of cool when I first put it together, but I received more than a few complaints about how that particular colour combination actually made it difficult for people to read. Given that the bulk of the content on the site is actually comprised of articles that are meant to be read, this was hardly good for usability.

This shot of the old design shows what the text looked like on the dark background

So, when it came to doing the new design, this issue was first and foremost in my mind. I had to make reading articles on my blog a more enjoyable experience.

To do this, I turned to the tried and true white background. Sometimes it can seem dull or cliched, but the fact of the matter is that it works. I also opted to go with a dark grey type rather than pure black. I find that this softens the text, and eliminates some of the hard contrast of black on white. Lastly, I bumped the font size up just a tad.

Overall, I think that it’s much more readable now.

Typography

In addition to just readability, I definitely wanted to do more with typography in this design. This desire was two-fold. First, I’m a big fan of carefully mixed typefaces in a design – especially the combination of serif and sans-serif. That’s more of a personal preference than anything, but since it’s my site, I wanted to pull some of that into the design.

The previous design just used a simple Helvetica (which apparently doesn’t render well on Windows machines).

I also wanted to try my hand at using @font-face, so as to introduce some non-standard fonts into the mix. I chose two. The serif font is the lovely Latin Modern Roman, which is really just a subtle variation on the classic Times family (which is used for non @font-face compliant browsers). The serif font is Carto Gothic, which I really like. Despite my fondness for it, however, I may change it at some point in the future.

Anyhow, I built an interplay of variation between the two typefaces, working to find that balance where the typography adds both interest and visual hierarchy to the page, without becoming to cluttered and confusing. That’s a fine line, and I hope I’ve managed to walk it.

Organization

The last design was not organized as well as I wanted, on several counts. The first was the widgets in the sidebar. There were lots of them – and mostly the standard fare: categories, twitter updates, archives, recent posts, popular posts, blogroll, tag cloud and so forth. It was a bad case of trying to make my blog look like what I thought a blog should look like, and needed to brutally and efficiently corrected.

The old sidebar was full of widgets like this Twitter box

Now, you will notice, there are no widgets in the sidebar.

I took the Twitter, recent posts, popular posts and blogroll (friends) and shifted them all down into the footer, making them easily accessible for anyone who wants that information, without allowing them to crowd out the main content. As for the tag cloud, I just completely trashed that.

When it came to the archives, I don’t think that people used them all that much, so I just set up a dedicated archive page, which contains all of the posts, broken out by month. It’s clean, contained and easy to navigate.

Then there was the issue of categories. As of a few weeks ago, I had way too many, which was symptomatic of poor content organization. I just created a category for this or a category for that, and before I knew it, I had this ridiculously long list. No more! During the design I factored all of my content into just a few categories, with the key ones being articles, tutorials, freebies, interviews and roundups. These, of course, make up the core of the main menu.

I then meticulously went through all of my posts and re-categorized them appropriately. This helped enormously with the overall organization of the site and with the reduction of unnecessary clutter.

Improved Forms

The forms on the old site sucked big time. At first, I was using a JavaScript library to beautify the forms, but that just caused more hassle than anything else. It made them look nice, at least most of the time. The rest of the time, it caused weird things to happen, such as text areas becoming a few hundred pixels too wide, or content falling out of the box.

The original form from the old design caused too many headaches

It was a nightmare, and I eventually just removed it in favour of standard form elements, which looked more than a little ugly in the overall design.

So, with the new design, I wanted to do better. And, I think I have. I used basic CSS styles to format the actually inputs. I also added labels on the right side of the inputs, in much the same style that I did for captions on images. Overall, it makes for much clearer comment and contact forms.

I improved the search form too, throwing it up in the top bar to clear out some more sidebar room, while making it leaner and more compact, but still readily accessible. I also used the submit button much like a label, to keep a visual connection between all the forms.

Loading Times

Though you won’t notice it as much in terms of the actual design in front of you, another area that I wanted to address was that of load times. With the some of the big background images that I used in the previous design, load times could be a little slow. It wasn’t a huge deal most of the time. When I had the occasional traffic spike, however, it started to become an issue.

In terms of the design itself, I tried to help keep things moving quickly, by limiting the number of graphics that I used, and keeping them small. The cross hatching that should be seen in any browser that fully supports the :before and :after psuedo classes is only one small 10 x 10 PNG, and the textured backgrounds are 100 x 100 GIF files of just a few tiny kilobytes each.

Then, of course, there are the CSS sprites. All of the icons are broken out into sprite files. Currently, there are three different files, which made sense for organizational purposes right off the bat. Eventually, though, I will probably look at merging them all into a single file to help reduce HTTP requests even further.

I still have some work to do tweaking WordPress and the guts of the site in order to squeeze a bit more speed out of it, but overall I’ve found load times to be greatly improved.

Tasteful Ad Space

You may also have noticed that the site now has room for advertising. I put a lot of work into the content here, and I’ve been wanting to implement ads for a while now, but kept waiting until the redesign. So now it’s finally happened.

One thing that was important to me, however, was to not overload the page with advertizing. So, I decided to take the one ad per page approach. Once I’ve actually sold some ads, there will only ever be a single sidebar add served up with each page.

This will benefit the reader by not clogging the page itself with dozens of ads, which all just become visual noise. It will also benefit the advertisers, since they will have sole possession of each impression and won’t have to compete with other advertisers. It probably means less money, at least in the short term, but I’m okay with that!

Wrap Up

Anyhow, that’s pretty much covers the major points I think. Obviously, there was a lot more to the overall design that what I outlined here, but those were the six major areas that I wanted to address with the redesign, and the thinking behind solving each problem.

What do you think? I would love to get your feedback on the design, both in terms of what I outlined above, and the site as a whole. I expect that this will work as a foundation upon which I will build and tweak things in the coming months, so your input will be helpful.

P.S. Wasn’t that easier to read?

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Hey guys. Today’s post is going to a little bit different from what you might typically expect to find here on the Echo Enduring Blog. I’ve been thinking about life and this blog and my freelancing career, and I’m just trying to get things more in order. I do pour a lot of time into this blog, and I would like to improve on a few things here. So, I’m throwing a few questions out to you, which I hope that many of you will answer in the comments.

What do you like about the blog?

It’s a pretty straightforward question. What are some of your favorite things about this blog and it’s content? I’m not necessarily looking for all kinds of praise here. I just want to know what you guys enjoy, and why you’ve become dedicated readers and followers of the Echo Enduring Blog.

Let me know what I'm doing right

With this information, I hope to be able to focus my content and vision a bit more, and really start to offer you more of what you want. I recognize that the topics of content can be somewhat broad. What I’m looking to do is get a bit more focused. If I have interesting ideas for articles that are a bit more off topic, well I have many alternate avenues for publishing that content on other prominent sites and blogs!

What do you not like about the blog?

Okay, I’m bracing myself for this one, because I know it will probably sting. Still, go ahead and let me know what you don’t like about the blog! Again, I’m looking more for information about the site’s content, and less about the actual design. We’re approaching the my one year anniversary in June and I’m aiming to have a completely new redesign up and running by then. Of course, if there’s something that you absolutely hate about the design (other than the white text on black background, which will be gone by June), go ahead and tell me that too.

Please, just be gentle!

Let me know what I'm doing wrong

By knowing what you guys don’t like in terms of content, style, post frequency (or whatever), I can work on improving in those areas, making a better reading experience for you and all future readers.

What is you favorite content?

My WordPress stats give me some indication of what some of the most popular posts of all time are, but that information is based entirely upon page hits and some of the highest ranked pages are the ones that have been picked up by some of the bigger players on twitter and other social media. Here are the top 10 articles according to my stats:

• 5 Things to Consider Before Designing Your Next Website
• The One Thing You Need to Do to Become a Better Designer
• Free Stock Photos for your Website – 11 Solid Sources
• If Photoshop Was Batman, Then Illustrator Would Be…
• 10 Photoshop Filters You Should Definitely Know
• The Most Important Site For Any Web Designer?
• 25 Creative Website Footers
• 9 Wickedly Free Heraldry Vectors
• 25 Stunning Examples of Avatar Fan Art
• The One Design Tool You Absolutely Need to Use

But what about you guys? Are these also some of your favorite articles or is there other content that you really enjoyed that just didn’t make it onto this list? Personally, I also like some of these lesser read articles:

• 13 Key Elements to Mastering Photoshop – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
• Six Technologies that Changed My Life
• Defend your Designs Against Unexpected Defaults
• A Broader Understanding of Value
• 8 Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Start a Design Blog

The Fictional and Completely Made-Up Origin of Freelancing

What about you?

How do you feel about the Echoes posts?

For the past 30 weeks or so I’ve been doing a weekly post that includes one logo, one artwork, one tutorial and one website that I really like, and giving a bit of a review of these. I call these posts Echoes (as a not-so-clever play off of the name). I’ve received some positive feedback on these, but the posts generally don’t get huge traffic. Of course, I don’t really promote them as hard, since I don’t feel that these are the types of articles that appropriate to be featured on various social voting channels (which are already getting a bit clogged).

Should Echoes become monthly rather than weekly?

These posts do, however, take a good chunk of time to write. So, I am thinking of shifting these a little bit by changing it to a monthly occurrence. This would be a bit bigger and feature some of the best stuff that I’ve found over the course of the month. It will probably also be somewhat less structured, without necessarily including the same exact amount of different types of content.

What are your thoughts on this?

How do you feel about guest posts?

I am also hoping to get a few more guest posts going here on the Echo Enduring Blog. Every Saturday morning, I publish Brad Colbow’s The Brads comic, and last month I published an interesting guest article from Amber Weinberg, but I am still looking to have some more great guest authors on here from time to time.

Looking for guest posts

How do you guys feel about that? If I remain committed to still maintaining the highest quality posts (which I do) are you cool with having regular guest posts on the blog? I’m looking to eventually have one guest post a week, but let’s start small though. Maybe one per month?

If you’re interested in being a guest author here on the Echo Enduring blog, feel free to hit me up and we’ll chat.

How am I doing on the other stuff?

Finally, I would like to look beyond just the content and look at how I am doing in some of my other interactions. For instance, I am pretty active on Twitter and I hope that most of you are following me there. How am I doing? Is there anything else you would like to see in my tweets or are you pretty satisfied as a follower?

Some of the things that I am definitely wanting to get better at is to respond to more of your comments (I do read them all in detail, I promise). I’m also looking to get more active on my Facebook page (and I hope that you will too, letting us build up a meaningful conversation).

Is there anything else I could be doing, though? Are there any other ways that you would like to connect with me? Please let me know. I’m always looking to improve in these areas.

Well, those are all my questions for today. I hope you can take a few moments to answer some of these questions in the comments and provide me with some much needed feedback. Thanks! Looking forward to providing a better experience and having more contact with guys in the future!

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Alright folks, time to break out the violins. Just over an hour ago, my wife went through the front door on her adventure to Haiti, leaving me here to take care of our little girl. As such, it’s going to be a different sort of week here in the Wardfort (as a good friend of mine calls this place), and for the purposes of time management, I have elected to pass on this week’s Echoes, to free up a little bit of time to take care of my daughter and work on a few pressing client projects.

Don’t worry, though, I’ll be back next week, so if you have any ideas for content for that post, please feel free to share it.

In the meantime, I leave you with this video for the new recording of “We Are The World,” an all start collection of singers whose passion is clearly evident in their voices.

It’s been about two months since the earthquake hit in Haiti. Now is the time to give. Now is the time to take action. The response we take to the disaster in Haiti can’t just be about getting the country back on it’s feet, because it was barely there before the earthquake it. No, our response has to be so much more than that. It has to be teaching Haiti to walk again, giving it the strength and the confidence to stand on its own, to make something of itself.

So, if you haven’t already, I urge you to give. For this week, I’ve given my wife, and we both hope to give more in the weeks and months to come. In fact, I expect my wife to return home with a new sponsor child.

I’m looking forward to it.

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As I’m sure you all know, the nation of Haiti was completely devastated by a powerful earthquake last week. It’s kind of put things in perspective. Here I am sitting on my nice, shinny Macbook, blogging about beautiful images, logos, websites and such. Meanwhile, thousands and thousands of people have literally lost everything. For many, the loss was fatal.

Help me do my part to help with the relief work in Haiti

It may be cliched to say, but my heart aches. But I’m doing what I can to help! You can too! If you want details on what I’m doing, and how you can help, they are at the end of this post. First, though, let me tell you what Haiti means to me.

My Connection to Haiti

Back in 2006, my wife and I traveled to the Dominican Republic on a humanitarian relief effort (seriously, the Dominican is not as prosperous as some people think). There are millions of Haitian refugees living in the DR, and given the fact that I speak French (albeit not so well anymore) and they speak French Creole, I was able to communicate and speak with many of them. I was touched, transformed and above all humbled by those conversations, and one in particular.

In a tiny little village at the end of a horrible dirt road, and surrounded completely by fields of sugar cane, I met a man, who shall remain unidentified. We’ll call him Louis. Louis was Haitian. He was also educated. We talked briefly about Plato and Aristotle and I found myself amazed that I shared more than just our common humanity with this man. We shared a heritage of thought and philosophy. It stuck me then, and strikes me even harder now, that poverty does more than just rob people of material possessions.

It also robs them of their dignity, even in the eyes of those with the most sincere desire to help.

I never expected to meet such a man. Somehow, I had been expecting the poor to be simple and uneducated. The shattering of that preconception changed my life forever. And for the better.

This is me, drawing pictures for the wonderful kids at Louis' village

As it turned out “Louis” had been a police officer in Haiti, but had found the horrible corruption too much to take. So, he had packed up his family and walked them through the jungle and into the Dominican Republic, where he worked in a factory for a minimal wage. He had a daughter, and when I met him he his wife was expecting twins. I hope and pray that they were born healthy and strong.

So, for me, the Haitian people are more than just another Caribbean nation. They are the brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and cousins of a man whose hand I shook, whose stories I listened to, and whose continued well being I hope and pray for on a continuing basis.

Doing My Part

Now, with the devastation in Haiti, I am doing my part. First, I am working with my youth group to design and produce a collection of T-Shirts, which we hope to sell through a variety of mediums. All of the profits from those shirts will go directly to an organization called ERDO, which will then funnel the funds into the relief efforts in Haiti. I will post more about these shirts when details become available.

Second, I am auctioning off some design work. I am making 2 logo designs and 1 poster design available to the highest bidders! Instead of me keeping the money, though, I will be donating it. Again, it will probably be going through ERDO.

• 2 Logo Designs – $300 Value; Bidding starts at $200
• 1 Poster Design – $250 Value; Bidding starts at $100

If you are interested in purchasing these services, please place a bid, either by commenting below or by contacting me directly at matt@echoenduring.com. My goal is to raise between $700 and $1000, so if the design work goes even for its standard value, I will meet that goal. But, please feel free to bid even higher. Remember, every cent of this money will be donated to the relief effort in Haiti!

I will leave the bidding open until the February 1st. Also, all payment will be up front, since we want this money to be allocated to the relief efforts as quickly as possible!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If my design services can be of any use to you, I certainly hope that you will consider bidding.

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I haven’t posted anything for a couple days now. I’ve been busy helping redecorate our living room/dinning room. Basically we just painted a couple of walls and hung some new artwork that we purchased on the weekend. However, I am taking a few minutes to post this incredible image that I came across.

Lately, I have been working through Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. I read the first five about two years ago, and picked Lord of Chaos up a few months ago. Currently, I am reading A Crown of Swords and loving the fact that most of it is from the perspective of my favorite characters so far (Perrin, if you must know). Anyhow, as I usually do with every series I read, I have also been perusing the internet to see if I can find any cool art (fan or otherwise) relating to these works. It was in one of these searches that I came across this absolute gem:

Moiraine Damodred by Pyji

The painting is of Moiraine Damodred of the Blue Ajah, the first of the Aes Sedai that we meet in the series. I won’t get into much more detail than that, since this post really isn’t about the books.

The point is that this is the single best piece of Wheel of Time fan art that I have ever seen. The style of the painting is really grungy, which I like, and the costume is really well designed. I also love the way that Pyji managed to really capture the ageless quality of the Aes Sedai in Moiraine’s face. Smooth as porcelain and very beautiful. It’s not the way that I have imagined the character to look, but somehow it still seems right.

Anyhow, kudos to Pyji for this awesome work, which I just wanted to share with everyone. If you like it, go check out her gallery on deviantArt. She’s got a really awesome portrait of the Joker too (a la The Dark Knight). Oh, and keep an eye out for another post about Wheel of Time art, where I am hoping to collect some of the best art that I can find from or relating to the series. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line!

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I just wanted to take a moment to thank Jay Henley Photography for the awesome shots that they took of my family. About a month ago, we had a photoshoot in the village of Elora, Ontario. It was an awesome time. Neither my wife nor I had ever done anything like this before, and Jay made us feel totally comfortable.

We started in a park, just getting some shots of my beautiful daughter, Brynn Eden Mackenzie Ward. She was pretty busy, toddling around on the grass carrying her beloved stuffed hippo. Despite the business, though, Jay got some absolutely gorgeous shots, like this one:

My favorite picture of Brynn

We also managed to get just a few shots of Brynn and I. This is one of my absolute favorites – me, my little angel and, of course, Hippo.

Me and my little angel

Getting family shots was a bit difficult. Brynn is kind of a busy child, and very, very squirmy. Still, we got a few great shots, like this one of the three of us having a family hug:

Brynn loves family hugs!

Some of the shots of Kelly take my breath away. Here’s one of my favorites. I’m not sure how I ended up with such a gorgeous wife, but I am thankful for ever every day, and not just because she’s so beautiful. She’s a wonderful woman and wife and an incredible mother!

My beautiful wife

Of course, Jay’s specialty is wedding photography, so we left Brynn with one of the girls from our youth group and Kel and I went off and did our own little shoot together. That was a lot of fun, and we got a lot of great individual shots, and others of us together. Again, here is one of my personal favorites.

Kelly and I together

There were a lot more shots, but these are just some of my favorites. You can see a few more on my about page and personal bio.

For more information about Jay Henley Photography, visit their website and check out their blog. If you’re looking for a great photographer, I highly recommend Jay. He has an incredible eye – not only for framing the shot, but for location too.

And one last thing: I was fortunate enough to have the chance to work with Jay on another project too, when I recently redesigned the company logo. The process was a smooth as could be – just the way a designer likes it. You can check out the logo here.

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I was looking through some of the most popular items on deviantArt yesterday – something that I do quite often – and I came across this little flash gem, entitled “1000 Words“, by Wenqing Yan (known as yummei). Done up as a web comic, this piece combines stunning artwork with a very poignant story.

The artwork itself has an obvious Anime influence, and employs one of my favorite styles out of that genre. The eyes are large, without taking up the characters entire faces, and I love the somewhat sketchy line work, combined with a watercolour type wash. It reminds me a lot of the artwork from some of the Final Fantasy games, and even more of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (though with a distinctly less gothic feel).

Here are a few screen shots of the beautiful artwork.

Screenshot from "1000 Words" by Wenqing Yan

Screenshot from "1000 Words" by Wenqing Yan

Screenshot from "1000 Words" by Wenqing Yan

Screenshot from "1000 Words" by Wenqing Yan

As beautiful as the art is, however, it was the story that really captured my attention. Without really giving anything away, I would have to say that, while there’s nothing particularly deep in it, the story was enough to warm my heart and make me want to share it here.

So, go have a read for yourself. It’s pretty short, but certainly worth a read.

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Hey. Welcome to Echo Enduring Media. This is my first official blog post, which means that it’s mostly going to be about the blog, and what the blog is going to me and all that kind of stuff. Nothing too spectacular yet.

Basically, the blog section of my site is going to contain a number of different types of posts. If I post a new freebie to the resources section of the site, I will usually post about it here (so be sure to subscribe in order to get new freebies delivered straight to your RSS reader). I will also be posting about different projects that I am working on. I may post some designs, or an illustration. I will also post periodic updates on my various writing projects.

I will also post other blog like articles, pointing you to cool resources that I find, ranting about art, design and writing (or, sometimes, a combination). I’m also planning on eventually starting a few regular categories, like an Artist of the Month series of posts.

I’m sure that, over time, the specific focus of the posts will shift and evolve, but I will always strive to bring you great content. So please enjoy, and feel free to leave a comment or two!

- Matt

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