The site was designed to serve the blogs: viewable by license, story type, art type, sculptor, etc., although the early comps don’t show that. The content had to be king. But we also wanted the design to be able to highlight the most important stories and features, look like a toy site, and retain an edge to honor Art Asylum’s heritage. So we built the homepage to work in thirds across the top, 1/3 on the left to accommodate the section features and 2/3 for the biggest stories and best pieces of design.

Additionally, we wanted the most current stories directly available on the home page. The main image area at the top was already pushing the fold of smaller monitors, so to save space we put the headlines in DIV layers, an idea that sees its germination in the version shown in the thumbnail above. Although that one reminds me of all the color palette missteps we made.

The last round of changes was a big jump. The line work that “suspends” the pieces of the site wasn’t introduced until the last round. We gutted Flash and went with java and Ajax to streamline everything.

Take a look at the design process for the home page.