Website Design/Development
In April, 2009, I decided that I wanted to start traveling more. Not one to do things halfway, I decided to pick up my life and my business and start living a mobile lifestyle, running my business from the road and living in a new country every 4 months. Exile Lifestyle was born!
Part of the inspiration for this was the desire to write more (I worked as a columnist for a while back in the day) and to document my lifestyle design exploits. I needed a good website to display all the content I would be creating accessibly and attractively.
I decided to create a minimal site, one that is super-easy to navigate and hard to get lost on. Lots of white space, colorful, attractive photography (courtesy of Cris Dobbins) and dramatic-yet-simple typography were key to creating the look and feel that I wanted.
I aimed to keep the style of writing fairly casual to counteract the stylish-but-regimented feeling of the site, and I wanted to make sure that the color scheme was reminiscent of the simple black/white/red of a nice letterpressed poster design, but with colors that are toned down (desaturated reds, gray blacks). To help establish the visual hierarchy, I overlapped clean white ‘panels,’ with the navigation on top, followed by the main content area and the scene-setting sidebar on the very bottom.
To flesh out the content and provide extra value to my readers, I also created an Exile Reading List, which contains feeds from some of my favorite websites and blogs, all cataloged cleanly and concisely (and updated automatically on the hour).