The good people at InfoZerk, ye of the business card production process from hell (my fault, not their fault), recently commissioned me to redesign the homepages for The Lounge and Ruby Row, two advertising networks that draw together influential bloggers in the development space and apply the “strength in numbers” philosophy to them.

Both are sister sites, with the same basic information architecture and the same structure. I completed the Lounge design first based on a Press Kit design that I had executed for InfoZerk over the winter. Most of the colors and the 50’s inspired formica-looking pattern in the header and footer were driven by this previous design.

Once The Lounge finished and approved, the challenge became to use the existing Lounge structure to construct a clearly unique design for Ruby Row that was still had an obvious connection to The Lounge site design. I changed the color scheme to one that was inspired by the Ruby Row logo and built a new pattern reminiscent of gem facets for the header and footer.

Both designs were built in Photoshop. HTML slicing and CSS was provided by the client.

The Lounge

Ruby Row