Just updated the ol’ portfolio with the work I completed recently for my good friend Gretchen Kolderup and her blog, Librarified. Gretchen came to me a couple months back, wanting a simple blog reskin…or so she thought! The project quickly spiraled out of control in the best possible way and I’m really pleased with the end result.

I began with the logo, settling on a stylized portrait of Gretchen with a nice smooth serif typeface. Her flaming red hair pretty much sold this one, and we settled on two versions of the logo: black and red for print materials, full color for the blog itself.

For the blog, Gretchen wanted to position herself as youth-oriented but professional, with an eye toward a more-than-just-books attitude. I took her existing default Wordpress theme and did some pretty thorough reskinning, resulting in a completely original look. Though there are plenty of old-school library elements here — rows of books, wrinkled paper, red silk bookmarks — the type treatments are all very modern, and the design is textured without looking old or messy. I particularly like the header tagline and icons, as well as the detailed book background image, which is extra-wide for users with larger monitors. You should really check it out to see all the bits up close and personal.

Not content to stop there, I also designed business cards for Gretchen and Librarified. The two-sided card features information about the blog on one side and Gretchen’s contact details on the other, delineating visually that these are two separate sides of what Gretchen does.

I even did a bit of customization to the Librarified Twitter page; although Twitter is pretty limited with their options, I did what I could.

All in all I’m extremely happy with how everything turned out, and so was Gretchen, which is of course the goal of every design project. It sounds like the redesign has been getting lots of favorable feedback and traffic for Librarified, as well as some clickthroughs to my own site and hopefully future customers!

An exciting project announcement is coming very soon, stay tuned…
Bp