It’s an exciting day here at doQer HQ as we’ve just received the final design for the doQer homepage, created by the insanely talented Winnie Lim. I’ve worked with Winnie on a few different projects now and every time she’s exceeded expectations. We’re really pleased with the look and feel of the new homepage - classy and elegant!

Only the homepage has been designed so far. Obviously the same “look and feel” will be used throughout the site, but the sub-page designs haven’t been created yet as not all of the functionality has been finalised. We’ll get round to that soon, but in the mean time here’s a run down of how we arrived at the current design.

First of all, we sent a (very vague!) design brief to Winnie. Here’s an excerpt:
“we’ll be hosting user manuals that might contain their own graphics, artwork etc, so it’s quite important that the colour-scheme of our site (which will appear around the edge of the user manuals) is neutral enough not clash with lots of different stylistic elements, but also stands out enough to be noticeable as a distinct part of the page (what an impossible request! - sorry!)”

We also created a very rough mockup in PowerPoint:

With only our kindergarden-style drawings and impossible colour palette requests to work with, Winnie came up with this amazing first draft in no time at all:

We loved the new design, but having requested toned-down colours when we saw this design we did a U-turn and decided it needs much more bold colours in order stand out and be memorable. Winnie cheerfully accepted our feedback and came back with the following masterpiece:

That was pretty much perfect. We just wanted to change the diagram a bit so it was more in-keeping with the rest of the design, and put in a footer so we could see how it would look. That led to the third and final design, which we’re now in the process of transforming into HTML/CSS goodness. Check back soon to see it for real!

It looks nothing like how we imagined it would, but that’s the great thing about working with a talented designer - it leads in directions you never thought you’d go, and the final product is better as a result. Thanks again Winnie!