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Curbly Redesign Launched!

by on Jun 2, 2010

Today I’m very proud to announce the launch of our redesigned site. I think the design speaks for itself, so I won’t go into much detail explaining all that has changed, but I wanted to describe the process we used to arrive at this new look and feel.

The main graphic elements in the header were designed by a very talented architectural artist named Kirsten Sparenborg (check out her AMAZING blog and Etsy shop, and buy some prints!) I approached Kirsten with the idea of designing our masthead after seeing her unbelievably cool architectural sketches of old Savanah. Like this one:

   

I could tell she was super-talented and understood the Curbly concept of ‘Love Where You Live’. Kirsten agreed to help out, and came up with a few different ideas:

created at: 06/01/2010

created at: 06/01/2010

created at: 06/01/2010

We loved these sketches, and finally (after much hand-wringing) settled on the third one, which became known as the ‘floorplan logo’. A few rounds of revisions later, and Kirsten came up with this:

created at: 06/01/2010

Perfect! It had an organic feel, while reflecting what Curbly is about much better than our previous design. Next, we handed Kirsten’s ideas off to the excellent Web designers at A Good Company, where Caroline Hadilaksono converted them into a more Web-friendly format. Here are some examples we had to choose from:

created at: 06/01/2010

created at: 06/01/2010

As you can see, the second design is pretty close to what we’re launching today!

This process was pretty unusual; merging the work of two different artists, one print-focused, the other web-oriented and coming up with something that really feels right. I want to thank Kirsten and Caroline, as well as our Curbly writers DIY-Maven, Chrisjob and ModHomeEcTeacher (who provided invaluable feedback and testing) for helping make this redesign a reality.

So, what do you think? Leave your comments (and questions) below. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Bruno Bornsztein
Publisher, Curbly.com 

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