Creattica Daily Redesign + Format Change

As of today Creattica Daily has a fresh new design and a significant change in format and content. As you’ll see we’ve replaced the blog with a neat design homepage – or “portal” as they used to call them back in the late 90′s. The new homepage aggregates some of the best design RSS feeds around the web, posts up new editions of NC Winter’s popular Creative License strip and the latest inspirational imagery from our design gallery.

It’s been almost a year since we first launched Creattica Daily and we are moving the site in this new direction partly because of larger plans here at Envato and partly simply because the blog hasn’t proven to be financially sustainable – i.e. it’s been posting losses for a very long time :-)

When Daily first launched I’d had a couple of plans for the Creattica domain, one was to create a sort of social network for creatives and the other was to build what I call a “Sessions” blog about creativity. In the intervening months both these plans have been folded into our Tuts+ plans and we’ll be unveiling a Sessions site there and a social network in the next 6 months. We’re doing this partly to consolidate a little and partly because it’s become apparent that both plans make more sense as part of our broad Tuts+ plans.

Meanwhiles this Daily blog, while experiencing a healthy growth in RSS readers (up past 7,000 recently) hasn’t really grown much in traffic or revenue. Consequently it’s been a bit of a loss maker for some time now and it doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. Since Creattica.com – our inspiration gallery is continuing to grow and has proven to be financially sustainable, it’s going to be the entire focus now for Creattica.

So today we’ve given Creattica Daily a makeover, and it’s sporting a massive 1280×1024 optimized design. In case you’re wondering this is the first time we’ve ever created a site design in this size, and it’s a bit of a test to see how people react. Less than 8% of Daily’s visitors are on smaller screens, so it is a good place to give the larger size a whirl. So we’d love to hear your feedback.

I’d like to say a special thank you to Niki Brown and Travis King for working so hard on Creattica Daily this last year and also thank you’s to all our loyal readers – thank you for all the support!

By Collis Ta'eed

Comments

redwall_hp August 3rd

My 13″ MacBook pro has a screen resolution of 1280×800, so it works fine for me. I did have to widen my browser window a few pixels wider to get rid of the horizontal scrollbar, but it looks pretty good.
Jonathan Patterson August 3rd

The wide site threw me off at first. I like it though. Might as well make use of this 1680×1050 monitor! 8)
twe4ked August 3rd

Cool new design, I love that its optimised for 1280x now :D If your monitor dosn’t support that size, get a bigger one..
Jake Scott August 4th

Thats a shame I found this to be one of the better design related blogs. Always fresh and of epic quality.
Catalin Zorzini August 4th

Wow, it really looks great!

There are quite a few makeovers in the design blog niche, we have covered a few here http://www.inspiredm.com/2009/08/03/redesign-rage-new-facelifts-for-6-blogs-from-the-design-community/

Congrats for this awesome experiment!
Paul Davis August 4th

(Blank message, sorry! Please delete!)

Despite it’s width it still displayes perfectly on my iPhone. :)
Bojan August 4th

Liking the new format, although it will take a bit to get used to. I especially like the idea of the homepage.
Brandon Cox August 4th

I like it a lot – pushes us in that new wider, let’s move on, dimension. Feels spacey! Excellent work!
Alvaro August 4th

I love the new design Collis, congratulations!
Chris Brandrick August 4th

Nice new design, I think, considering your audience, you will have no problem with the new sites width. I like it!
salman August 4th

well to be honest i hate this change and many wont like this either, browsing content is more difficult and every change is not a good change.
creative8 August 4th

looks great, but the horiz scroll is annoying…

keep innovating, though!
Sean Lum August 4th

Personally I would have designed for a 1024×768 monitor, according to w3schools, 36% of the internet populous still has a resolution of 1024×768. Which is a lot considering how many people browse the internet. Its cool that it is optimized for a 1280, but I still like thinking of everyone considering runner up when re-designing for monitor width.

Also, it looks like your layout could have been “liquid” and you could also re-size the images using jQuery to scale with the size of the page. Just a thought.
Kuldar Kalvik August 5th

I have to agree with salman. Seems to be a big step backwards. I really liked the previous one better because it was so simple and to the point. Right now when I go to the homepage there are way too many things screaming to my face and I have nowhere to focus.

But thats just my 2 cents.
Steve Otenad August 7th

Awesome, I think im covered with 3840 lines of horiz. resolution :)
Ferron August 9th

It’s a good design but I agree with Kuldar that there is too much content on the home page. It’s also not that great for me because I have a 1024×768 monitor and don’t want to spend money on a new one.

The thing that bothers me the most about the width is that, according to Wikipedia, 36% of users still have a 1024×768 monitor. I’ve seen a whole bunch of sites that display a horizontal scrollbar on that resolution too. Yet even though IE6 has 27% market share, most web designers make sure that the design does not break for it. So really, you could say that designers are more concerned about the dieing IE6 that everybody wants to get rid of than the still present 1024×768 resolution.
Christian at dailyplush.com August 25th

I like the new Design but I’m righ now on a 1024×600 netbook resolution because my laptop is defective. But it still looks nice here ^^
Michele September 20th

I liked it pre-redesign. I barely even go there, anymore.
Stu Collett September 3rd

Nice design.
Inkfreakz - Tattoo Design February 22nd

wow nice design