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Redesigning a website: Stosłowia

There is a website I’ve created many years ago, Stosłowia (Polish only), which collects stories of up to a hundred words. It never got any users, but I didn’t really care to promote it in any way either.

Last week I’ve decided to rewrite it from scratch, because so many things were wrong about it – from an ancient backend in plain PHP with hardcoded credentials and no separation of concerns, to login with Facebook (and only Facebook) that stopped working... Now it’s a fresh Symfony 4.1 with Encore with some new features (like automatic screenshot generation, seen for instance on Twitter).

But what I’d like to show you, is how a couple of pretty small design changes have made the whole website way nicer visually (IMHO).

Logo

Let’s start with the logo. The old one was the laziest option possible: just an icon of a pencil from Font Awesome v4.

The new one is a modification of free vector icons created by Denis Sazhin from the Noun Project (CC-BY), that looks way more individual. Its elements form a “100”, which relates to the name and the purpose of the website.

Old design

Maybe I shouldn’t judge the design, if it’s me who created the website, but since it’s mostly a Bootswatch theme anyway, I’ll dare to say: it’s not bad. I like it. It’s clean and minimalist.

What I don’t like is my own choices: like the jumbotron with random background images, which made the text not-so-readable, even with the addition of a text shadow, or the lack of a footer, which makes the website look somehow... incomplete...

So what I did to polish it up:

Check out the end effect below. What do you think? 😉

New design


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