Infochimps Blog – Redesigned for Information

The wonderful Infochimps organization needed a blog makeover to start off their re-design push. Visit Now…

I recently had the pleasure of redesigning the Infochimps.org blog, powered by wordpress which was just launched the other day. Infochimps is an site that organizes huge information resources and collects data-sets.

Infochimps

Description

I got in touch with the Infochimps team through twitter and we got to talking about starting to redesign their blog which was at that point a stock wordpress theme. Infochimps deals in data-sets and they wanted their blog to reflect that to it’s readers. Developing compelling and professional content was their main method of proving their authority to their readers but having a beautiful blog design certainly couldn’t hurt.

Goals

I was to develop a very simple but highly customized blog design that ran on wordpress to help secure an intellectual stake hold in the information resources niche. Many of the features were the same as the previous blog but all were to be well designed and fit within the new aesthetic. Clean and concise were important adjectives. The blog was to in any way possible support the main site – infochimps.org.

Concept

My concept was to create a look that was very minimal, clean, and efficient looking. I also wanted to highlight the content more than the design since the articles are the most important thing about any blog. Finally I found ways to include lots of little pieces of meta data about the site within it. Above each post is the word count and category count and much more. The footer features blog-wide tallies and the tag cloud is an out of the ordinary way to visualize the most popular topics on the blog.

Solution

The final design was worked over and tweaked many times resulting in a very nice final product in my opinion. I’m quite proud of this piece. The header features the typeface Museo and has links back to the Infochimps main site and to the organizations twitter account as well as the RSS feed for the site. The minimal feel, small text, and prevalence of numbers and statistics all add up to a nice data blog with lots of potential

Next Up

Next bits and pieces of the Infochimps main site will be up for re-design. These are a great bunch of people to work with and be sure to check out their site at www.infochimps.org the next time you need an awesome data set.