As promised, here is an image of the first stage of the design for this web site. It doesn’t include the top header and menu yet and the illustrations for the footer are still missing, so what you can see so far is the background design and content.

When I first thought of doing the design for my own web site I decided to be the most honest I could. It’s something that happens naturally when Naomi and I work in design for other people, but when it’s about yourself is easy to get tempted to try look like someone cooler or better than what you think you are. My idea about this design is: “What you see is what you get”. So I’ve tried to create the atmosphere that really has to do with my art and persona.

For instance, for this web site, I have tried to create a feeling of the woodlands. All of the images and illustrations are on top of a background of black Conte drawing paper, since most of the illustrations are in (digital) Conte drawing. The image of the background is a scanning from a real paper that I did. The trees are intended to look like black ink on Conte paper. For these I was inspired by Eastern art and also some beautiful ink drawings that Roger Dean did in the early 70′s for the booklet of Yes album “Yessongs”. I’ve been trying to get the same feeling of half-hidden dark on dark drawing that you can only notice depending on the angle you look at it. Depending on the kind of screen that your computer has this effect may be more noticeable.

For the headings of the articles I tried several things but finally I decided to use this paper thing with Conte highlights and a classical mailing rubber stamp for the date of the posts.

The background of the content is this repeating image of long trees. My original idea was to draw branches, but it was not very practical in order to get the images repeating in the right way, so I decided to leave this minimalistic long silhouettes of trees.

In my next post I will show more about the customized font that I have created for the site.