Redesigned!

For me, this project has been a dream come true. I was a fan of Cloud Four long before joining their ranks, so it’s been fun and rewarding to amplify what was working before, while revising what could work better.

So, what changed?

The new site embraces a visual identity based on a shared vision of what we stand for and a collaborative exploration phase. Our goal was to make something friendly yet studious, nerdy yet inclusive. We adopted a bold, high-contrast color palette and modular scale to keep everything clear and readable with as few extraneous elements as possible.

Prior to the redesign, we actually had two sites. Our primary domain was static, while a subdomain housed our WordPress-powered blog. While we still adore static site generators, the blog remains our most popular destination, and the remaining pages suffered from the disconnect.

Now, everything’s under one roof. The homepage can dynamically show off upcoming events and featured posts, our bios can include contributions we’ve made to the site. This also encouraged us to add more dynamic content that was buried before… all our talks are now available with slides, recordings and other ephemera clearly accessible. Our open source projects and other experiments are also much easier to find.

Though many thousands of readers have enjoyed Cloud Four’s articles, our previous site was somewhat timid in its approach to defining who we are and what we stand for. From the homepage animation clearly demonstrating the sorts of projects we excel at, through new pages detailing what we do and what exactly sets us apart, we hope that visitors will gain a better sense of what Cloud Four is all about.

As with most projects, no amount of diligent testing can expose every bug prior to launch (I’ve seen half a dozen GitHub “new issue” notifications as I’ve written this post). We’ll continue to fix issues and improve the site, now and into the future. If you see something amiss, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop us a line.

I’d like to thank the founders for agreeing to embrace this redesign, our project manager for all the cat-herding projects like this require, and my fellow designer-developers for putting so much of themselves into this effort.

Are you seriously still reading this? Go check out the new site!