Metamorphoses, a journey in redesign

I had an opportunity recently to do a redesign of the Metamorphoses website. Metamorphoses is a literary and art journal produced collectively by the English and Art departments at Cerro Coso Community College. The site owner, Gary Enns, said he wanted something more modern, more along the lines of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The site was previously designed within the Cerro Coso site design, with all of the standard navigation and design templates applied.

The two main challenges of this project was to create something visually interesting with a very limited color palette and secondly, to design a graphic that would be a visual representation of metamorphoses. The color scheme was the age-old dynamic red, white, and black. Using web-safe colors I selected colors that I felt would all work well together, incorporating orange for unvisited/visited links and a bright blue for active links. The image created to represent metamorphoses is very simple and is a series of circles that turn into squares. The overall site is pretty clean, straight-forward, and was fun to design.

Sometimes I really enjoy designing the small sites that don’t have a lot of pages, but that have cool content. Gary described the site as being “modern retro” and I would have to agree with his assessment. Overall I really enjoyed working on the redesign and am now going to take on the redesign of the blog to bring consistency of design to the entire Metamorphoses spectrum.

Check out the new Metamorphoses site