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The Lincoln Forum

The Lincoln Forum Web site - early mockup example

Project Details

Project Summary

You win some, you lose some.

This project was done through The Computer Doctors for an organization that, according to their site, "is an assembly of people who share a deep interest in the life and times of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era."

My instructions for this design project were fairly rigid as the organization had some definitive styles that they wished to keep. These included a color palette (red, white and blue), font (Copperplate Gothic Bold) and an illustration of Lincoln that they had used for years.

As I began looking through the materials that I was given as part of this project kick-off, I came across a wonderful illustration of Lincoln. Unfortunately, it was not the one they had currently been using as part of their brand.

I began designing this project within the constraints I had been given, but my dislike of Copperplate Gothic Bold and my love of this illustration of Lincoln kept coming back to me. Eventually, I realized I had to do a design to get it out of my system - one that would be a rethinking of The Lincoln Forum brand from the ground up.

I started with the illustration of Lincoln and built a color palette around that image - some grays that worked well with this central visual element of the design. I also tried to find a font that had some similarities to Copperplate Gothic Bold, but was crisper and not as heavy, eventually settling on Trajan Pro. It wasn't what I was asked to do, but I really liked the final product and felt it met the overall needs of the project beautifully (other than adhering to the style guide, of course). I hoped that the organization would be open to the rebranding once they saw the design and crossed my fingers that it would meet with their approval.

As I said, you win some, you lose some. The clients loved the layout, but wanted to use their colors (thankfully they choose more subtle shades of red and blue as opposed to the much brighter shades they had been using to that point), their font and their illustration. The final project can be see at www.thelincolnforum.org.

As any designer will attest to, having a design you are excited about changed and tweaked to a point that takes it very far away from your original work is par for the course - but every so often, it's nice to let some of those forgotten designs come out to see the light of day for awhile. So while I make it a general point to only show live projects in my portfolio, this was one discarded design that I decided to showcase here - in part because I find it interesting to compare this first version with the final version to see what a difference a font and a few colors changes can really make to a design.

For the actual project, I contributed the design of the site and built out the XHTML and CSS templates for the pages before turning this all over to The Computer Doctors to finalize.