Website Overhaul!

Hey guys. Wow. It's been a long time since I've written on this blog. It was hidden for quite a while. But as you can see, this blog is 7 years old and has been active since 2015. 

I wanted to write this blog post to celebrate the new version of my website, but at the same time - to honor the previous version of my website that has served me for so many years. 

For the longest time, this website has served to showcase my skills as a concept artist in the entertainment industry, helping me attract clients for video games, movies and theme parks. As of now, this website will serve a new purpose. It will be the home base for "Mr. Chris Art Studio" where it will serve to attract students and parents to my classes. 

I would like to take a moment of silence to thank my old website. 

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Thank you.

Snippets of my old website are still there. Not everything has been changed. Before, I was a Theme Park Designer who taught classes on the side. Now, I am an art teacher who does "Theme Park Design" on the side. The roles have reversed. 

Redesigning my website was a huge undertaking. This was a lot harder than I thought. 

My design challenges were two-fold. 
1) Re-brand myself and tell my story as an art teacher. 
2) Optimize the website for mobile. 

Telling my story as an art teacher was fairly straightforward. But, redesigning the website for mobile was a lot harder than I thought. It was like solving a sudoku puzzle where everything needs to line up. A lot of my old desktop layout looked TERRIBLE on mobile.

​I had to constantly reformat and redesign the layout so it would look good in desktop AND mobile. What I learned was that I needed to create sketches of these "poster ratio" sketches that looked like a mobile phone, and use that for my mobile layout. 

Below are some of my process sketches that I created for my website. These sketches were not created all in one go. There was a lot of testing, a lot of failure, a lot of re-thinking and re-planning, until I finally had something I was happy with. 

Hope you find this glimpse of my design process interesting. Welcome to my new website. 

Welcome to Mr. Chris Art Studio. ​

Screenshots of new website on mobile

Creating my new landing page

Telling my story as a teacher

Redesigning my landing page - PART 2

Redesigning my landing page - PART 3