Fear not, londoneater.com is alive and well, I’ve not abandoned my beloved project (yet). You’ll be glad to know I’ve been hard at work putting together all the elements of this site. For the fortunate few who have been visiting lately, you will have noticed several changes. The logo has been rehashed a few times, the widgets shuffled about, pages added, then deleted, and then added back again. Colours all over the place. For now, i’m happy with the way things look.

The Logo

I started out with a simple idea, to have a simple and effective LONDON EATER in big letters scribbled across the top of the page. But I thought it looked abit too bland.

So my next idea was to have LONDON EATER, still in big fonts, but this time accompanied by an orange. That orange didn’t look that appealing to me either, I need something with greater impact, something with omphf. 

The following iteration, I threw the orange out (it looked so lonely) and replaced it with the a mock up of the underground map. I wanted something that stood out, represented london and london eater all at the same time. Replace the station names with food names and put london eater on the map and we’ve got a winner! Not quite.

At this point, I was beginning to wonder if I had inadvertently conditioned  myself to critiqing my own work to the point where I reject almost every idea I come up with. Maybe I’m just fickle minded. Anyway, I go back to basics and this time, its a chicken. I still havent found the design that ’feels’ right.

Feeling it

In order to go down the long and winding path to discover the true ‘feelings’ I have for my blog, I eat out. I’ve duly reviewed the places I ate and will post them online in the following days (keeping things exciting for you). It’s strange how most of my ideas seem to materialise while I’m near food, maybe the release of gastric juices somehow trigger my brain cells to working harder (wow, that does sound strange).

It occured to me while I was staring at some wonderfully sumptuous shui mai at royal china, and thats it, I wanted my logo to convey that exact image. So here’s my brilliant idea (open to raging debate of course), take mind blowingly sumptuous food photos. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I have a sneak suspicion the ‘feeling’ might be among those words. 

Behind the banner 

Now that I have my banner, I still want LONDON EATER in a simple and effective way at the top of the page. Adobe fireworks is a great program and its got plenty of really cool fonts, but, you know, it doesnt have the one I want. Luckily for me, I stumbled upon Urbanfonts. Several hours of tinkering later…

“Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the londoneater banner” Hooray.

Oh man, that was hard work.

My new tag cloud and call me (that’s right, call me)

This is my favourite widget, the cumulus tag cloud. It’s so cool! You’ll need flash installed, hover your mouse over it and the tags will start spinning. Everything is clickable and it’ll take you to the posts which have that tag associated with it. Try it now in the sidebar.

Someone left me a comment and wanted to contact me, but I didnt have my email on the website. So now, I added a contact form. Try it here, send me a message, rest assured, I will get back to you shortly.

Site construction is 80% complete 

I don’t want to start making promises just yet, so I don’t want to say ‘I’m ready’. I’m saying I’m almost there. Afterall, this site is still only a few weeks old, and I’m sure there’s still lots of improvements to make. Having spent a solid ten days tweaking the design, cleaning up the code, deciding on the themes, I think it’s about time I start adding to the reviews section. I’m aiming for one post per day, ok, maybe one every other day. That’s more realistic. Like I said, I’m almost there.

Watch this space.

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