Goal
One of my hobbies/interests is craft cocktails and home bartending. I started Drink Designer to share my passion for cocktail making with others. It started off as just an Instagram account, but I always wanted to have a website that included all my cocktail recipes as well as the blog articles I write.
When thinking about the overall design of the site, my goal was to to create a design that was very clean so it didn't distract from the content I was presenting as well as reflecting the modern vibe I was trying to create with my brand.
Sketches
With that goal in mind, I went to sketching out some of my ideas. I focused mainly on the homepage and the recipe/article template.
The Design & Development
After had a general idea of how the pages would look, I went straight into development. I ended up simplifying the design a lot when I got into the code. This was the design that I ended up launching with:
The redesign
A few months after I launched the site, I decided to do a redesign. One, I didn't love the overall look and feel of the site. The logo needed some love. I also didn't like the fonts or colors I used initially. Two, the site layout wasn't working with the content. The initial design had all the recipes and articles displayed in the same section on the homepage, which wasn't an issue in the beginning. But, as I posted more content, it would be easier to navigate if the content was seperated by type, like it was on the rest of the site.
For this new design, I took more of a user-centered approach. I took a step back and thought about who my target audience was and how I could redesign my site to better suit them. The whole reason I started the site was because I wanted to share what I've learned about craft cocktails and home bartending to encourage others to create their own stuff and share with the people in their lives. If the audience I was trying to target were people who were interested in learning more about the craft, then my design should make it easy for them to find that information.
So, I implemented new sections on the homepage as well as refreshed the overall design.
Technologies
I'm a huge fan of the JAMStack. I've used Jekyll and Hugo for static site generators in the past, but I used Gatsby for this project to get more experience working with React.
The site is integrated with Contentful to manage content.