Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

Welcome to the fresh new Be Good Not Bad! I’ve moved all the content over from my old blog, and have everything in one tidy spot here at BeGoodNotBad.com. I’ve had the idea for this redesign for awhile now. Ever since I started Be Good Not Bad, it’s made less sense to have my blog on a separate site.

The other thing that was really missing from this arrangement was a good logo. Granted, back in April I fake-redesigned the logo, but what I really wanted was something I could use over and over, in business cards, laptop stickers and the like. The woodgrain + coffee cup photo was just not up to the task.

I consulted with longtime friend Vance Reeser and brought him on to do the stylized coffee cup you see in the logo now. I have to say he did a fabulous job. I’ve gotten lots of feedback from friends about the cup and the stylized foam. Some think I’m trying to look like a fierce tiger. I’ll let you decide for yourself.

I also wanted to simplify the stream of information with the site. On the old blog, there was a sidebar for my linkblog, and in the footer was my selected music finds. In this redesign I brought those into the main content stream, integrated with blog posts on the home page.

On the technical side, I switched from the amazing Textpattern to the super-powerful Expression Engine for this project. The switch went really smoothly, thanks to Jon Hicks’ import trick. I still like Textpattern a lot, but it made sense to switch as Expression Engine was well suited to the task and, and I do a lot of work in it.

Check out the portfolio while you’re here and leave a comment to let me know what you think. Lots of hours went into it, but man, it sure was fun.