By August 2003 I had already gotten tired of the original design for ClarkRasmussen.com that was developed in May of that year. I had never really liked the first design but I had yet to come up with a better one, so I worked out this design.
There were two drastic changes. The first saw the navigation moved to a set of tabs above the page content. This wasn’t the first time I had used a tabbed navigation on a site but for the first time I used the tabs to indicate what part of the site the user was currently browsing.
The second major change was the use of inline frames to control the size of the content. Looking back I realize that the use of the rarely-supported iframe was a bad idea but it seemed like a good solution at the time.
The two-column design survived from the original layout, with the left column containing randomly-selected thumbnail images of sites I had worked on (or sub-navigation, in the case of the “portfolio” section) and the right column containing the content.
To solve the problem of having no pre-existing graphical elements to use, I developed a personal logo for use on the site.
The logo consists of simple elements. A skewed ellipse in white, outlined in blue and then grey, sits behind text spelling out my initials. The text is in lower case, colored dark grey with a blue stroke.
The above text and images were copied directly from my original portfolio as I imported it over to the blog. It was not updated for re-publishing.