Website Rebranding

If you’ve been following the Sciencetext.com blog for a while, you will know that it started out life as Significant Figures on Google’s Blogspot system several years ago. I had acquired the Scienctext.com domain in the meantime and it languished as nothing more than a holding page until I’d formulated a plan…which never emerged.

Then, by chance I saw that Google had changed its policy and suddenly allowed its Blogspot bloggers to use a blogger custom domain, which meant the old Sig Figs blog could be permanently redirected to Sciencetext.com and bring its pagerank along with it. I’ve discussed the various issues elsewhere.

Significant Figures gradually became a laboratory notebook kind of blog in which I could record the fixes and hacks that have helped me keep my various websites, computers, and life running relatively wrinkle free so far. As such, the name Significant Figures seemed to be less and less relevant to the blog’s content as the number of tips and tricks posts grew. There is a Sig Figs calculator just for old times’ sake and the archives still carry all of the original SF posts.

Anyway, I’ve been gradually morphing the site to reflect the fact that Significant Figures as a name has been dropped. Recently, you will have hopefully spotted the new ST favicon.ico. Creating this new icon was tied in with the launch of a neat plugin by Labnol’s Amit Agarwal, that displays your site or blog favicon next to your comments instead of trolling around for an avatar. Comment on this post and leave a link to see it in action.

With the favicon uploaded it was then time to re-do the main logo. Below you can see the summary sequence of how this was created in Photoshop. First, I created a full-color montage of various web browsing, blogging and social media (web 2.0) tools all of which are mentioned regularly on Sciencetext.com. Each graphic was pasted as a new layer, and rotated and resized to fit the new logo format. See if you can spot all the references, there are ten.

The next step was to convert this garish layer into a lightened greyscale image to act as a canvas on which the site’s actual logo could be overlaid. That was due using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, which means the final lightness and desaturation could be tweaked easily without messing up the individual layers:

The original full-size version of the ST favicon.ico graphic was then overlaid on this canvas together with a new text layer to create the prototype version you should see below. What do you think?

However, I wasn’t happy with this. So, I went back to an idea I’d had a while back about using a dynamic tag cloud as the banner image for a blog. I didn’t get this to work properly but used the idea overlay the logos image above with a pseudo-tag cloud showing a few keywords from the Sciencetext blog.

Then, of course, I showed the new logo to my wife and business partner, who thought the word sciencetext looked almost camouflaged, especially as I had also added an orange RSS button to the right-hand side and a blue RSS button (for email subs). So, I messed around with font, removed the giant favicon, dropped back to just the orange RSS and made the Sciencetext a whole lot bigger. Then I showed it to my friend Wayne Smallman a web designer at Blah Blah Technology, who suggested tying in the new logo with the logo from sibling site Sciencebase. I hadn’t thought about doing that before and was a little worried they’d end up almost conjoined. However, I gave it a try and changed the font to a much chunkier one, realigned a few of the tags and gave it a duo-tone effect but no reflection, and the result is as you see it in the header above.

Meanwhile, regarding the name of the website – Sciencetext.com – originally, this was related to the first few dozen posts on Significant Figures in terms of the fact that the main thrust was scientific and it was all about how words (and numbers) are manipulated and mangled by the mainstream media. However, with a little reverse engineering, I’ve shoehorned the concept of ScienceText to fit with the current remit of this blog.

The word “Science”, after all, simply means “knowledge”, and with units of knowledge, knols, high on the agenda, it seems quite buzzy and trendy almost. The word “Text” of course can refer to the individual blocks of words that make up a post, an entire document or tome, or the format you should usually choose if editing a script or hacking some other file on your machine to make things work better.

The whole process of creating a new logo, favicon, and essentially rebranding Sciencetext has been quite cathartic. Moreover, I did the graphics work on a day when my cable router decided it had had its chips and so I had no internet connection and no incoming email to distract me. I highly recommend website rebranding.

Oh, in case you didn’t spot them the underlying graphical montage is composed of logos for Google Chrome, Firefox, Feedburner, RSS, flickr, Facebook, twitter, MySpace, delicious, and WordPress.