After checking out my work, John chose me specifically to work on his designs and gave me complete creative freedom (He’s a nice guy like that!). This allowed me to really go to town on the sketching process to develop an overhaul of DesignBump as if it was a site of my own. Since its launch the site has always used an arrow as part of its image, which fits in well with the nature of bumping an article up until it reaches the front page of the website. With this in mind I continued to draw out the logo concepts and looked for a unique way to display the arrows as some kind of graphical mark.

My final concept for the logo mark was the combination of three arrows flowing along a plane, each one changes direction and points upwards with some reaching higher than others. This metaphor translates to articles submission process on the website: An article is submitted and plods along in the upcoming section until it acquires enough votes, it then takes off and is promoted to the front page, resulting in some articles gaining higher votes than others.

A unique colour scheme was then chosen, and subtle effects added to the graphic to really spice it up and add depth. This added dimension does a great job in lifting the logo from the screen.

The project then moved onto the development of various icons and voting buttons, all of which are seen on various blogs across the web. With the actual website design, I wanted to keep quite a minimal layout that adhered strictly to an underying grid.