I know it has been awhile since I have posted anything, but I am still around. 2009 has been a fairly busy year for me, but I will save that for another post.

About a month ago, I was brought in to do the redesign of the new breaking benjamin website. The design started with the art work for the album and I used as many elements as I could into the site as to keep a consistent look. I was responsible for the main design, which meant doing most of the graphic work and all of the CSS. The flash media player was done by someone else.

The design process went pretty well because there were quite a few elements that I could use from the album artwork. We knew right away that we were gonna drop support for 800×600 resolution screens. This gave me a lot more room for the content. Speaking of dropping support, we also are not supporting IE6. It is a very old browser and just not worth the time trying to support it. Back to the design, the date and month tags, on the sides of each post, are images, but the comment count number is normal text. I gave the comment count a small text-shadow that is the same color as the text, which gave the text a real soft edge and helps to blend it in with the date text. (Note: The text-shadow only works in Firefox 3.5+, Safari 1.1+ and Opera 9.5+. Internet Explorer does not support it.)

I created the navigation bar from scratch and I am very pleased with the way it turned out. It was also one of the very last parts completed. The idea was to come up with something that was very industrial looking and I think it qualifies.

The site has been running on wordpress for years and the new site is no different. WordPress combined with the endless number of plugins gives me an amazing amount of control and power over the site. It is also very important for the site to be easy to use, so that any one can update the site.

All in all, this was a very satisfying project to complete and the band loves it, so that is what really matters.

Here are a few screen shots of the site.

Visit breaking benjamin’s website.