willmoyer

Recently, I was approached to do a redesign of NochNoch.com. The site is a self-help, personal development blog written by a woman named Enoch Li.

Unlike other similar self-help blogs, Enoch doesn’t write “how-to” advice. Her content reads more like a personal letter, or journal entry, describing her experiences and what she’s learned. It was this aspect of her site that I decided the new design should showcase.

It sounds like a no-brainer, but the more experience I gain as a designer, the more I realize how important content-focused design is. It’s easy to fill a page with decorations and graphics and make it “pop.” It’s much harder to cut down the distractions and fluff and really build the site from the content out.

I wanted NochNoch.com to embody that feeling of a personal letter. I wanted readers to enjoy handcrafted text that was set beautifully following typographic principles. Read the page “My Story” for the perfect example of what I was trying to capture. And hopefully did.

Trying to embody a handwritten letter or journal entry is great but this is the web, not a piece of paper. NochNoch.com has readers all over the world reading in multiple languages and on multiple devices.

Prior to the redesign, Enoch was maintaining separate sites for Chinese and English, each with its own mobile version being served to small-screen users. The new design integrates this all into one. Traditional Chinese and English are now on one site and the appropriate language is automatically served based on a user’s computer settings (with the option to change by clicking a button in the footer).

Furthermore, the mobile versions have been abandoned in favor of a fully responsive design. Try resizing the browser window and you’ll experience the site shrink, the font size adjust, and eventually the columns rearrange. This adaptive design is an elegant solution that allows every user to have a similiar experience whether they’re on a big desktop monitor or tiny iPhone screen.

And the experience is really what is important here. From the carefully set text, to the colors, to the soft transitions when you hover over links, every design decision was made to capture and sustain the personality of the site.

It’s for these reasons that this has been one of my favorite blog redesigns thus far. It was great working with Enoch. I’m grateful that she allowed me to experiment and the push the boundaries rather than settling for a “typical blog design.”

I think it paid off.