It feels like forever since I last posted anything. It’s not like I’ve been ignoring everyone, I just been busy working on some amazing projects, and Today I want to share with you one these projects; Get Creative Today!
Get Creative Today, is a site dedicated to proving courses on a variety of topics. The concept for the site was, thought up by me and my darling husband, Chris Burris. As educators its our philosophy to help change the world by educating others. We’re both very creative individuals, and love learning new things, so we decided we wanted a way to way to share our knowledge and unleash the creativity of others around the world.
The mission of Get.Creative Today, is to change the world! By challenging you to Get Creative Today! We aspire to help others be creative by offering a variety of tutorials and lessons on topics from making paper airplanes to building websites. We hope that with our lesson we can help others unleash their hidden creativity and change the world.
Aside from putting this project together, I worked on both the brand image and web design. The main design concept started a year ago, with the logo.
I knew the logo would be text-based but I wanted a graphical element to it. Originally I thought that creativity falls along the same lines as generating ideas, so I thought of adding a lightbulb as the dot for the “i” in creative, but felt that it copied my “Akram’s Ideas” logo too much, so instead I came up with the idea of using a firefly, suddenly we had a mascot, Sparky the firefly.
Sparky FireFly – Get Creative Today mascot
When adding the firefly to the logo, I wanted to make it feel as if it was flying over the logo, give a sense of movement. I decided to add a loopy swoosh, to give that vey effect. I used a dashed stroke so that I would appear as if it was a fading trail.
After coming up with Sparky, I focused on the logo type, I tested out all sorts of font combinations.
I tested out many different font combinations.
After trail and error finally decided to use a font name Pacifico. Pacifico, is a bold script font and the words looked fun and whimsical when written in lowercase.
Get Creative in Pacifico font.
Originally the site was going to be “get creative” but when purchasing the domain name, we discover that it was taken. So, we opted to go with “Get Creative Today” this meant I had to change-up the logo a bit.
FInal logo design, Get Creative Today
After designing Sparky, we decided to use his colors as a base for the color scheme, including a shade of orange, green and blue as accent colors. The colors would all be kind of earthy and muted. I also came across a great canvas texture for the background of the site. It had a homemade, crafty feel to it and it matched well with the color scheme.
Although, the site does use photography within the tutorials, I wanted the elements of the site to be vector based, and have an illustrative look to it. So, using Adobe Illustrator, I created these elements, trying to stick with same color scheme.
Get Creative Today illustrative icon set
When putting together the site at first I thought about using WordPress. However, since the site is all about learning, and one of main lessons is about Web development a d design, focusing on HTML,I decided to write the entire site by hand using HTML5. This way the site could be used as a coding example for my students.
Get Creative Today website built using HTML5 and CSS 3
Lastly, after starting the site and putting some lessons live, I decided to market the site via Facebook and Twitter. I wanted to really create a brand image for the site. Sparky being our mascot and all was a natural choice for our avatar. Second we really wanted to highlight our mission “to change the world”, so we used those elements in the background of both social pages.
Speaking of getting creative, “Get Creative Today” was too long a username for Twitter. The obvious thing to do was to use a number “2” instead of “To” in “Today”, but that username was already taken. So, I did some creative thing and we came up with @GetCr8tiveToday for our Twitter account name.
Keeping consistency of the Get Creative Today brand through social media
All in all I’m really happy with everything about Get Creative Today. I love how we’ve branded it, I adore our mascot, Sparky; and I really do believe in our mission to “change the world” through creativity.
In closing I challenge you to Get Creative Today, and learn something new, so go on check out www.getcreativetoday.com