Did the prep work pay off? I know it's difficult to measure cause you don't have a control. But what do you think?

I'm relieved to see you are not this Billy Mitchell

I would guess it was in-house, no?

If you inspect the code all the comments are written in Kanji

Nice, and useful. I was thinking of something similar recently. What would be awesome is if you could package this up as a Chrome Extension. Is that possible?

Seems like the only way feedback + growth + questions + friendship type design communities work is if you create your own with a few like-minded people. Sort of like a Mastermind Group but less formal. A slack channel could be all that's needed.

Yeah, somewhere between 2 and 3 years ago

DN took a turn for the worse when registration was opened to the public. Hate to say it, but from my view that's what happened.

Personally, I was moderately involved in the earlier days but lost interest after open enrollment cause it just turned to crappy posts, poor self promotion, and cruft.

I still peak at the homepage a few times a week, but probably spend <10 seconds scanning the headlines and moving on.

Good questions!

My goals starting off were:

1. Content first. I want to drive the web direction based on content over decorative design. And expand on the core marketing aspects of our brand, such as Case Studies and Services.
2. Simplify. Too many websites are going nuts with animations, parallax, videos, and fancy layouts. I want to go back to simple layouts that generally follow the natural flow of the web. Keep the fancy stuff to a minimum.
3. Performant. I want the website to be fast beyond belief and crush through performant development. I left WordPress behind and built the new site with GatsbyJS. It's fast and offers some cool tech for free that will help with performance and ranking (PWA, service workers, etc. Stuff Google likes). Also using Tachyons for styles, limited JS additions, and very few images (outside of content images, like portfolio).
4. Pro. I want to promote the Spacetime brand to the next level so it fits in with top-tier agencies in the industry. Comparables would be Octopus, Huge Inc, Instrument, MetaLab, Agence Me, Focus Lab, Thoughtbot, Fantasy. Not that we perform the same type of level of work, but at a glance the Spacetime brand appears to follow that type of standard.

Option 1: This was a natural progression of our current brand and website. Followed some of the same design patterns and introduced new content. I do/did like it. I added some new things like introducing emojis and collage illustration. Which is fun, but maybe too whimsical?! Illustrative graphics can also be difficult to maintain because you can just whip out a new page if an illustration is needed. And then there's the file size to deal with too.

Option 2: I did some digging and research on top agencies, like the ones listed above, to find commonalities. I think my findings would make for a good blog post. I threw out some of the whimsy and moved to a classic design aesthetic with a modern mix of light decoration. White, black, most color provided by content. Bright images, and people.

Next Step? Love the input and would appreciate more. I will probably go the route of completing and publishing the version I have. Then come back when available to reformat closer to Option 2, if and when I have time.

Thoughts?