With the introduction of the new Hansen Industries web page, I needed a good template and logo. Normally I’d make my own WordPress theme, but it has gotten so complex to make a really good one. There are much more talented theme designers out there investing their efforts so supporting them seems worthwhile. The template I found is Basic Maths, a commercial WordPress theme with a great newspaper-esque grid and lots of modern features. I did customize it a bit of course — making the post headlines easier to read by un-nesting them from behind the entry-date block — resetting the whole theme in Helvetica Neue which among other things has a much tighter kern-table than plain Helvetica — and centering the whole layout in the browser window instead of the upper-left justification it came with.
For a logo I just wanted something very simple — a urban factory building — just like the kind so many hip companies are refurbishing for their outlet stores. I started by googling up some pictures of factory building — picked one and did some quick outlining in Adobe Illustrator — then popped into Photoshop for some rearranging, clean up, detailing, layout and color. I made the original 512 x 512, and even turned out a quick icon file for easy multi-resolution use. Here’s a bigger version of the final design.
