For the full inside track on the launch check my post over at the Evolve blog which details some of the new features and what had to be cut in order to launch on time.

Screenshot

New Gmail header

Old Gmail header

About Time

These changes are actually pretty significant and its happening all over Google. And based on what I’ve read about how Google used to operate its design methods I find these changes both refreshing and fascinating, see:

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Douglas Bowman on Leaving Google, March 2009

Its not me

Since moving to the new avatar hardly a month goes by when someone doesn’t pick up on the similarities between the freebie avatar and the one I had commissioned. Case in point last week when a Mark Wilkinson posted on twitter that he had found my doppelgänger while browsing a CSS gallery:

Of course, I set Mark straight and went about my day but I’ve had a niggle in the back of my mind that this thing is starting to piss me off so let me try and explain….

My own fault

My avatar image was drawn by digital artist Scott Jackson who originally drew the freebie Envato file and also wrote the tutorial on its use. It was because of his previous work that I commissioned Scott to draw out my new avatar and I even asked for it to be BASED on the work he’d done for the Envato tutorial because I felt that with a  few modifications I could get something that looked a bit like me.

I think the original email to Scott went something like:

Do me an avatar (mascot) that looks like the one at Tuts+ but make him blonde with blue eyes and a v-neck sweater.

Hardly the most challenging brief, but it worked

By hiring Scott to do the work I knew I would get something a little similar to the Envato character because that’s what I wanted and I suppose I should have known that 100′s of other sites would adopt my avatars brother as their own mascot and lead to this confusion. Its a testament to Scott’s skills that a throwaway piece of work he did for an old client (Tuts+) has become so popular.

FYI Scott also did all of the illustration work on Wonder Themes.

Living with it

I like my avatar, I really do, so I’m sticking with it – even if at a fleeting glance it looks the SAME as the Tuts+ freebie that is being used all over the place.

And see, it does look like me:

That’s me on the right at a recent BarCamp

So if you see the famed freebie character (AKA LinkGuy) being used out there on the web don’t assume its me, it probably isn’t

Truth is, I’ve stuck with the current base6 logo (above) for longer than I should have and the only reason I stuck with it for almost 2 years is because I have over 3000 business cards that use the current design (lesson learned).

I also had some old niggling memory from my college design class where the tutor proclaimed that you should “never change your logo or typeface!11!!1!!” – although this may be a good rule to follow it has been broken by a LOT of large companies and organisations with mainly positive results.

Killing the rocket

The base6 design rocket icon was the first thing I ‘made’ for the business. It even came before the actual name of the business had been officially decided. If you didn’t notice the resemblance I used the ‘Planet Express Ship‘ for inspiration:

My initial idea for the rocket was to build upon its image and add space-stations, moon bases, astronauts and robots to the ‘base6′ universe! As cool as this sounds (and it does) its a dumb idea and frankly I don’t have the artistic kudos to achieve the complex illustrations needed to do it properly so for this reason, its out.

The dumb revelation that helped get me reboot

While sketching out the words ‘base6‘ on a couple of post-its during some downtime something dawned on me – the lower-case letter ‘b’ and the number ’6′ look sort of similar – obvious yes? Well, no – I’d been using the ‘base6′ moniker for almost 2 years and never noticed this resemblance.

It was this simple revelation that inspired me to take action and after firing up Photoshop I’d converted my scribblings to something new that I instantly liked:

The process in the image above moves from bottom to top and you can clearly see the 6/b synergy in each of the mock ups and how the design evolved over time.

Eventually I decided on something like this:

The new logo is on top, the old at the bottom. The colours are not final but with a little more tweaking (when I get the time) I think I’m getting somewhere.

Of course, the logo is just the first step. I need to re-work the website and get some new printed materials for physical use. All of this will take a couple of weeks, maybe months to find the time to work on. But the base6 re-boot has started and nothing can stop it now.

Please let me know what you think in the comments or by dropping me a tweet or email.

The main change is the use of a mascot which is something I’ve had lurking about for a while, here is his story:

The mascot

A few months ago I commissioned uber-digital-artist Scott Jackson to develop me a mascot for use on the WPFixer project:

WPFixer.com - WordPress design, development and consultancy

The plan was to get hold of a simple character which was loosely based on my physical characteristics (ahem) and although commissioned initially specifically for WPFixer I’ve since decided to use the little chap on a few of my other projects.

Mascot from Scott's tuts+ article from May 2009

You may recognise Mr Jacksons work from his tutorial on Vector|Tuts+ 12 months ago titled “How to create a web site mascot” (see image left).

What you may not know is that this character was lifted from the failed LinksGuy website (Flickr screenshot, the site is now dead).  A useless if not interesting fact.

It didn’t take long for Scott to throw together a new character loosely based on the one used in the article and after giving him a new set of clothing and some accessories I had a brand spanking new mascot to play with.

Culling out the crap

After I had my mascot, all I needed was some free time and the drive to get my site re-done. This started by doing a drastic cull of over 50% of ALL the blog posts on this site.

I dropped all sport, TV, entertainment and general crappy posts and stuck with some new core categories of Design (design stuff), General (general crap), Technology (computers and gadgets), WordPress (its my CMS) and Work (any projects I’m working on).

The layout

I wanted the site to be simple, really simple, and white, no colours, well maybe a few but mostly greyscale. As a base theme for the site I used the excellent ‘TypographyWP‘ theme by ‘superskill‘ which helped be get the new design up and running in hours not days.

The major setback was the jQuery animated header which I toiled over for a couple of days. I wasn’t sure just how to go about implementing this and also even if it was a worthwhile feature – in the end I stuck with it and you can see by sticking your mouse over the header of the site you will get a different message ‘I do solutions‘ > ‘I do results‘ and the navigation will appear along with a colour version of the mascot.

The purpose

I’ve never really utilised this site as a blog. Truth is, I don’t really blog that often, maybe 5 or 6 times a year if I’m lucky. So I knew I couldn’t sell the site as a truly useful blog – instead I’ve gone for a simple ‘elevator pitch‘ approach which says what I do, who I am, where I’m from and how I could help anyone who may need a solution to a web-related problem.

I gained a lot of inspiration from this video over at the99percent which tries to convince digital creatives like such as myself that there is no shame in self-promotion and the only way that you will ever get your talents and skill-set noticed is to talk about them:

Hopefully this will be the last re-boot in a while and I can concentrate on improving on the base that I have created. There are still a few bugs and niggles that need working out and I AM trying to become a more active blogger so maybe this site and domain will finally serve me a purpose

Please leave some comments on the new design and I will be happy to respond.

FYI – I do plan on re-packaging the modified WordPress theme as a freebie download as it turned out to be quite different to the base theme I used, just give me chance to get around to that one eh…..

The above screenshot is from Super Awesome Buttons with CSS3and RGBa: Now More Super! which outlines how you can use some jazzy CSS3 effects to create amazing buttons without using multiple images or script hacks.

Doug was lucky enough to get a job with Google back in 2006 (after heading the Blogger re-design) and since then his site has been pretty much dormant.

Yesterday however, I noticed a post over at reddit that led me to the all new stopdesign website which was updated in the new year – it seemed that Douglas Bowman was back
 
Its also apparent that he has switched from Movable Type to WordPress – take that Six Apart..

Welcome back Doug, I missed you.

The influx in trafic seems to have had an effect on the sites normally rather trendy design:

When in doubt, call on the services of Kubric

In future, I’d recommend WP-Cache

Here are some screens from JCargoo:

I really hope Google are smart enough to allow people to develop and upload their own themes. I’d love to make my own.