As you are probably well aware over here at eightyone design we have a huge passion for VW campervans. We have written a couple of articles on them (When should a graphic designer stop designing? and VW campervan logo designs) and love to tinker with our own VW T25 Camper Van. We had been thinking of creating a blog solely dedicated to our hobby enabling us to write endless articles about various events we attend, camping, plans for our van as well as featuring other peoples vehicles. We finally launched www.vwcampervanblog.com last month and we are really pleased with the overall look as well as how it has been received by the VW Community. In this article we outline the design process we went through to design the blog and where we drew inspiration from.
Overall Style
We decided upon a vintage / retro theme as the blog would feature all different vans from 1950’s and 1960’s splitties through 1970’s Bay Window Vans and also the more modern VW camper vans.
Logo Design
We started at the beginning – with the logo design. Knowing we were after a retro feel we hit the usual inspiration hot spots such as Flickr. We found some great examples of vintage and retro drinks signs aswell as petrol / oil signs which we really liiked and seemed to suit the subject matter really well.
There are some great Flickr Groups on this subject:
Vintage Soft Drink Signs
Vintage Texaco
Vintage Soda Labels
Taking inspiration from the above logos we developed several different logo design concepts in similar styles but decided on the logo below. Several different colours optons were played around with but we both felt it worked best with cream and blue as it felt retro yet clean and crisp.
Website Design
We found an excellent blog post over at Smashing Magazine featuring a range of retro websites. There was certainly plenty to get us inspired! Many of the interiors of campervans feature vintage fabric patterns and we knew we wanted to utilise this in the design.
We also were itching to encorporate textures in the website design to create a layered effect giving the design some depth. We love the canvas material we found and felt it added to the vintage upholstery feel we were trying to acheive.
For the other elements on the page we wanted a distressed look as though they were printed on the canvas. This was achieved using several different layers combined with blending modes.
We liked the idea of using Polaroid’s to display the first image of the post to further the personal feel of the site and make images look a little more retro.
Overall we are really pleased with the blog design and feel that it has a simple vintage style which is reminisent of the VW Camper Vans and the era from which they came. It was both fun and challenging to design for ourself without having any client input. It also allowed us to explore some techniques and styles which we have not yet been able to use on client projects.
So what do you think? Do you like the overall look of the blog? Do you like vintage / retro style design? Or do you prefer something a bit more clean and simple?