here's that announcement i alluded to yesterday.

montana, who's a regular reader and commenter, recently asked me to redesign his website. i had already created the previous design for the now-defunct montana & mcdeviltoast blog, so he decided to let me take a whack at the entire website. (that blog is now dead, as mcdeviltoast moved to myspace, so montana has a new QEG blog here.)

more importantly, he had few requirements for the site ("something similar to the escape mechanism site would be great"), and basically let me run wild with the design. this made it an exciting opportunity to get creative and try different things, which i hadn't really been able to do for awhile on anyone else's site. (as you might recall, though i did a lot of work rebuilding the escape mechanism and some assembly required sites earlier this summer, i was mostly updating & adapting other people's designs there; i didn't get to redesign those sites from scratch.)

i like basing designs around text elements—see, for example, the BB Freelancing logo or the prodigious use of dingbats on the recycle your record collection shirt—because text characters can be powerful symbols, and more importantly, they're free to work with, and i don't need to draw anything or steal graphics from elsewhere. so i was really deeply interested in creating a design that revolved around the letter Q, a letter that's stylish as well as fairly rare.

in the end, i came up with the concept of making a Q-shaped sidebar/navigation menu on the left, sort of like the enormous mr yuk lurking behind my bad taste design, except that the Q takes on a more important function. the Q shows up in a few other places as well, such as in the fancy horizontal rules that separate blog posts, as well as on individual artist pages.

back when i did the original montana & mcdeviltoast design, montana requested a pink-on-black design, so i reused those colors for the new design. finally, to fill in the rest of the space, i made some fibonacci-inspired header graphics using red lines and a red grid that ended up only being used in the artists section. maybe it's a little bit freejack, but i think it looks cool.

some of the info on the site (particularly in the artists section) might be a bit out of date, but beyond that, the new site is live and everything should be working. check it out and let me know if you spot any bugs or errors.¶

looks great... congrats on your first completed job... ¶

i think it loks quite good.

now i need to get the content updated. :) ¶