After a whole month of brainstorming, sketching and coding, I’ve finally finished the layout! To be honest, this wasn’t what I had in mind when I first decided to redesign Sunshined.org. I was planning to make it the complete opposite of the previous version: clean, white and bright. I was also going to make it entirely on Adobe Illustrator. But as you can see, some things don’t always go according to plan. And I’m fine with that!

Here is one of the prototypes I made:

I was so so sure I was going to use this one. But after a few days of looking at it, I ended up scrapping the whole thing. I thought it looked a bit too plain and that wasn’t what I wanted. I was aiming for unique not bland. All I took from the original design was the logo, the navigation and the overall color palette:

After I scrapped the previous plan, I had to start brainstorming an entirely new one. I tried sketching out some stuff and vectoring on Illustrator, but it didn’t work out. Then, one day, I spotted my Dad’s pad of yellow lined paper lying on the coffee table. I really liked the worn-out look of it, so I scanned it.

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I went around the house looking for other textures I liked and found this ribbon from an old dress. I decided to scan that too and that’s what I used for the header and footer of the layout.

On the bulletin board in my room, I saw a petal tacked on to it. It had fallen out of my sister’s old books while I was reading it and I tacked it on the board a long time ago (which explains the hole). I saw it and decided to use it to spice up the header. I think it looks wonderful up there.

Long story short, all the great textures I found throughout my house became, well, this! My dad’s pad of paper became the content box of the layout, the back of my sister’s painting was scanned to give the layout a canvas background, and the tag that was attached to a sweater I had recently bought at the thrift store now holds my Twitter feed.

Although there were times when I wanted to pull my hair out while coding the whole thing, I’m really happy with how it turned out. I learned a lot and I love that there are pieces from my life and my family incorporated into it. At the end of the day, that’s what I want to feel after redesigning: that it was all worth it.