We have just published our new website design for PixEden (Pixel + Eden = PixEden), we hope that you will like the new look and feel. Not so much changed in terms of layout, but we added a few new things, re-thought the navigation in some case, and applied a new design feel that is more in line with the latest trend and our resources style.
Let's go through the new design together to let you in on what's new and what we provide with our website.
New Utility Nav Bar
The new utility toolbar now recognizes you by your name and greets you. It is more compact and includes only the needed links for your account. We moved all the static page links in the footer.
old utility nav bar
New PixEden Logo
Although I liked the old logo, we needed to get the logo in line with the new style of the page. I also wanted to have a more "corporate" logo, easier to read, more streamlined. I tried to kept the idea of the circular snake and used negative space to create a box in the middle that should represent a toolbox/chest of resources. I kept the lime colors and made them bolder with subtle gradient and shadows for depht. I think that overall we have a logo that's easier to recognize, cleaner and more representative of our design style. In terms of font, I kept the old one "Museo" to create a continuity from old to new, also I like that font a lot with its nice curves.
old logo
New Home Showcase and Font
We created some nice graphics to illustrate the different categories that our resources cover. The old showcase area was a bit less striking with no images, this time we wanted people to identify right away what the website was all about. Of note the images rotate fading and each are a link to their respective category.
Abou the font, we went from Museo for the headers to the classic arial / helvetica. The idea was first to loose another javacript/fontface load on the page (typekit), offer consistant rendering through browsers which was not the case with the old font, and lastly to have a font more in line with the new clean and modern design.
For the body font we made the switch from georgia to arial for consistency and also make the smaller fonts more legible.
New resource thumb box
We modified the grid style boxes of our resources with a new style and more information. When you hover the product images you can now see the published date like in the old design but also number of likes / download and the status of the resource (green = free / orange = free but you need to create an account to download).
The idea is to give you a better overview of popularity and type of product before moving to the detail page. Of note in the search page we have taken away the download / like count to replace it with the category of the resource so that you can easily jump to the appropriate section to help you browse the site better.
New download and share bar
We changed a bit the design and layout of the resource page sidebar, especially we made a much bigger and useful like button compared to the old one that didn't really convey any sense that you could give a thumbs up to what you see here.
We also dropped the share by mail feature (email sent was getting more in the spam folder than anything, and was also abused by our bots friend...) and revamped the social share bar. We added google plus link share and a pin it button to share to pininterest. Hope that it will serve and help people wanting to share the page.
We also moved the description text to the top to connect the resource header title and description in a more logic reading pattern. (title>description>download vs title>download>description).
old sidebar
Community and Download Sections
Don't forget to also check our community feature and download center that are available to all our members when you create an account
Conclusion
Well I hope that you all will enjoy the new design. We made a few more changes that I will let you discover by yourselves for those that remember the old design.
I also would like to encourage all of you that read the blog post to the end, to give us your opinion and any advises that you may have to make the website better.
PixEden is for the community to enjoy, so participate as much as you can by commenting, downloading, giving us feedback, sharing and using our community feature to give us ideas for future resources.
Thank you all for your support.
The PixEden Team.
