Blog Refresher: Improving Consistency With Design
Our Littlelines blog posts were suffering from a lack of consistency. Finding photos to place into our articles isn’t a huge challenge however finding that primary image, that are ultimately featured on the main landing page, proved a bit more challenging. So…
Design challenge:
Redesigning a series of blog header for the Littlelines website. A simple task, however I took it a step further. While doing some initial gathering of inspiration and planning I realized the bigger problem. In a perfect world we would have a set schedule for blog releases and thus could plan out all our release and subsequent images. But we all know this isn’t a perfect world. Our blog posts often come from a small spark of inspiration or during that rare event one of us has a little down time.
Side note: The real challenge for any internal project like this is time. It’s a balance of wanting great art while also needing to get it done. The best part? Often times constraints lead to better, more effective solutions.
Inspiration:
I was fortunate enough to not have to do much gathering of references for styles as we knew we wanted a flatter more filled illustration style. So the goal was simple- bright colorful graphics with a nice “pop” of color to draw attention. This was really the only direction I needed and I was off and running. The content was easy as it was provided by the articles themselves, I simply had to find an item specific to the content that I wanted to focus on.
Solution:
What ended up evolving from this idea of needing illustrations on hand and available to the writers at all times lead to a combination of custom and some more generic illustrations. Meaning I designed some of the illustrations for specific articles while also designing a set of generic headers for topics like design, development, and general content.
These were design so the background colors could be changed out giving us some variation in the content without forcing us to complete a new illustration every time a new blog post was to be created.
Final Design:
The end result is more than 20 custom illustrations and a blog that has more design consistency. All that while also speeding up production by letting the content creator select the art and publish their work without disruption. As time allows I’ll continue to add to these creating even more custom illstrations while continuing to populate the generic category as it expands.
Like what you see? Check out more of our design work on dribbble.com and thanks for the read.
