Spring officially started yesterday and as you can see, Sunshined.org is looking very ‘in-season’. (Just a note that the ‘archives’, ‘content’, and ‘links’ pages are still undergoing severe reconstruction since I have to organize and re-code everything.)

Every time I make a new layout, I always try to make each version unique from the previous. I do this to give it some variety and to challenge myself. Unlike previous versions, this one has a very dark color palette and has an entirely different structure. The header takes up a larger amount of space, the date of the blog entry is in the sidebar and a secondary footer was added to hold my Flickr pictures and other info. Finishing this took me about three months in total and it wasn’t easy.

My original plan was to make a clean layout with a very light color palette consisting of mainly yellow, white and purple. In the image below, you can see how different my original idea was from the final outcome of the design.

I made the flower lineart by taking a photograph of a flower that I found in my hard drive and tracing it using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. I used the same process when making the twitter bird on the sidebar. It was the first time I ever used Adobe Illustrator to make a layout, so at first, I had to find some tutorials to become more familiar with the program.

Fonts were a big part of the design process. I wanted to step out of my comfort zone and try out fonts that weren’t the usual Verdana, Arial or Tamoha. So, for displaying ‘Sunshined.org’, I used Museo which I thought was a very modern-looking font. The body font is Trebuchet MS and everything else is Cambria (which I thought was a better alternative to Georgia).

So this is the part where I ask for feedback…Please feel free to tell me how it looks in your screen and what you love, what you hate, etc. I think I’ve been looking at this layout for too long that I really don’t know what to think about it anymore. I’m going to go outside and get some much needed fresh air…