If you don’t already know Aaron Brazell from Technosailor - you probably should head on over there and acquaint yourself. Aside from being the server monkey Dir. of Technology for b5Media - Aaron shares some valuable information for WordPress users on his personal blog on his WordPress Resources section. . .

Aaron approached me a while ago about wanting to redesign Technosailor, along with adding some new functionality to his site. It was important to Aaron to have a static front page for his site, with links off to the sections of his site that provide the most valuable content, like his blog, his link blog and the WordPress resource section I referenced above.

Design-wise - Aaron was a designers dream. . . or nightmare, depending on your perspective. His requirement?

“Surprise me.”

Ok - well actually, he did have a few more:

• Plenty of clean whitespace
• Move away from the nautical theme that had been so prominent on his site over the years
• Absolutely NO ‘Web 2.0-ish’ treatment to the layout and graphics
• Clean lines, clean spaces, emphasizing on content more than design
• Finally, ‘don’t make me look bad’

After a little fuss and muss over the chosen color scheme, Aaron and I settled on a great scheme of red/cream/black. I kept the ‘Web 2.0′ elements out.. you will not see one aquafied icon on any page (unless Aaron added it himself). There is, however, the teeeeeniest hint of a gradient in the theme — but you barely even notice it. Overall, the lines are clean and graphics minimal - allowing for Aaron’s content to be the focal point of his site, which is as it should be.

Thanks, Aaron, for letting me do some design hackery on Technosailor!