As mentioned last month, The Rookies is changing in 2019 and will be launching a completely new website to kick things off. Envy Labs started the process in June and we could not be more excited and confident in what the team is creating.
I wanted to take this opportunity to share a small section of the exciting new concept designs that have been completed so far. We can't wait to show you more but hopefully this will get you pumped like we are.
Typography and Design Elements
Shown below is the foundation of our new look. We are going for a dark theme with our branded yellow accent colours. Headings will be large and bold, with clean typography selections to support titles and content.
Community Projects
Projects shared by our amazing community are the backbone of The Rookies so we wanted to make sure this are was optimised for encouraging a "rabbit-hole" affect where viewers will get lost amongst the content.
To achieve this we have opted for a small-gutter layout with featured projects dropped in to help break up the normal grid layout. These will be auto-generated based on your personal recommendations and high performing content.
Likes and Hearts are lame
We are all for showing appreciation and recognition where it's due. However, the idea of giving a like or having another love heart just didn't feel right for us.
Thanks to designer Olivia Howard we now have the High-Five.
So now when you want to show support for another artists work we don't want soft likes and hearts, we want you to give a full on palm hurting high-hive!
Fully customised project pages
This is where things start to get serious and will make out old site and other creative communities wish they'd teamed up with such a killer design and development team.
Our brief for the new content creation tools was that it needed to be fully flexible. We wanted artists to control what they showed and we didn't want any restrictions getting in the way.
The new tool will allow you to add single images, image rows, embed iframes(YouTube, Vimeo, Sketchfab, GitHub...), add a process view (multiple images that can be “scrubbed” through) and text sections.
You will also be able to finally add custom cover images and preview your page at any time in the process.
More Updates to Come
We have plenty more updates to share, so make sure to follow our blog and stay connected via our social media pages for updates.
In the coming weeks we will show you what your portfolio page, dashboard, contest pages and general core pages of the site will look like. We are so pumped about what is coming your way and we hope you are too!