From the logo to a new design

Well a few days have passed now and I’ve looked at the logo quite a bit, tinkered with it slightly and hang it around in the appartment so that I can look at it constantly and see it something bothers me. I even showed it around at work and to friends and the reaction was generally quite good. Some critic point was that the factory itself was too detailed and would be too much once the logo is printed very small. I’ve done that actually and did some improvement in that area but I didn’t reduce details, yet. I’m not sure I will since there are different areas I might tinker with it some more but I came to the conclusion that this is it, and IF I tinker with it some more it will only be to change some nuances but the logo will stay this way. and I’m really happy how it turned out. I have this now as a illustrator file which means I can print it in any size that I want which gives me plenty of opportunities. I will probably now focus on how to make it a bit more colorfull but the basic logo will always be a 2 color logo.

So now since I have my logo I started to think about the second task I assigned to myself, the design of this page. Yesterday at work I already started to put some things I had in my head down on paper when I realized that first I need to think about where I wanna go with the page, what will be the content in the future.

But before I go into this I think it’s time to look back at all the different designs I used (or didn’t use) for the-soap.com

It all started in early 2004 before I had the simple text logo, I put this thing together as some sort of splash page. There was nothing fancy about it and I had no real plan what to use it for but this was something that I liked and put together as an html file but it never made it public and so it stayed on my HD for all this time.

The first text logo as far as I remember never made it to the page I think, well I don't have any documents for old pages which included that logo in some way. But the second logo did later in 2004. but again, it was mostly used first as a splash page and led the user to the next destination: the-soap community or to andgodcreatednoni.com (both of these things don’t exist anymore). It was simple and easy and in the meantime, I tried to figure out what to use the-soap.com for apart from hosting the community and the biggest Winona Ryder fansite online.

Well, my passion for film was as strong as it is now so I thought about using it as a platform to present my work and so in 2005 I started to come up with a design that did that. It was a simple structure with a header and its horizontal navigation, a sub-navigation on the right and the content on the left side. It was nothing spectacular and in the time I was using this design I actually did only one tiny project even though I spent some time on equipment, like an audio recorder and a digital camcorder. Well apart from the tiny project nothing else happened and so with time it became this abandoned place no one visited and no one posted.

So I went back to the drawing and thinking board and thought about a more personal blog and include projects (if those would happen, but they never did) Now I’m not quite sure if this was supposed to be a page that included it all, the-soap, AGCN, the community and the projects all under the same design but I know I never switched the design of AGCN to this but I DID use it for the-soap main page for some time in 2006 and I really liked it. So I filled it with nonsense for some time (the new designs always put me under pressure for some time to actually post something, but it never stayed long) before I lost interest again.

This was the time in 2007 when I started to be interested a bit more in our influence on the world and how we can change that so I tried to implement the destruction of the world through man in some way into the design and that’s how the silhouette of nature slowly turning into a big city was born. I also implemented a script that changed the look of the page according to the time of the user, that’s why there were different looks of the page: night, dawn/dusk and day. I always wanted to include a rain version but that was hard to do. but I was once again happy with how it all turned out and I posted a few times until I was not happy anymore with the design and especially the complexity of it and how the logo and the thin lines were hard to see in the bright background so it was time for a change once again.

So later that year I had my new logo and I started to come up with ideas on how to build a website around that logo. The first thing that came to my head was the idea of a soapbox, which would nicely suit my need for a personal space on the net to spew my bullshit. so this thing was born (but never used). I liked it but I never knew how to put content and menu around it and I still had the idea of putting all my projects on that page. but when I look back now I like how it looks and maybe nowadays I would know what to do with it but of course, a lot has happened in the last 5 years.

But I never used it and so I kept spinning my brain for the next big design idea. I started to realize to keep it simple, keep the content big, front and center and have everything else reduced to a minimum. I found a nice photograph of a wave called ‘Wave Music‘ which I used for a blue design (I really loved the color blue back then). For this version I decided to post all work no matter what since I decided to draw some more again like I used to in the days before the internet, and for some time this seemed to work, I was posting regularly for quite some time and then it all fell apart again.

What I saw then was just the last blog entry on the main page for quite some time and I had to change that, and the only way to do that was to just put the logo up there and think real hard about what to do with the place. And so in 2008, I put the this up and it stayed like this for four friggin years. All I did was tinker with the logo a bit from time to time but for 4 years there was nothing else.

Until now when I decided this has to stop and came up with a way to work on the-soap and so far it seems to pay off. Within the first 10 days, I came up with a new logo. Now it’s time the same will happen with the design and the meaning of the-soap.com. I don’t expect this to happen just as fast as with the logo but I do hope by going back and by putting my thoughts down I will get somewhere.

I do have some thoughts but after this long post, I will wait (probably) until tomorrow to write them down here.