Digital Web Magazine has posted a great interview entitled Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site with Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain about his resdesigns of EllisLab, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and EngineHosting (I mentioned these earlier).  Sure, the title of the article isn’t very creative, but the designs sure were!

In it, Jesse walk through the full process discussing workspace, wire-framing, concepts, mockups, typography, icons and more.  He has a great sense of detail, and the way he walks you through his thought process is wonderful.

If you contrast one of the early drafts of the footer with the finished one, you can see that a few delicate touches were added to give it an extra bit of flavor. I swapped the icons so that they would stay consistent with the rest of the site, added a soft grey fade along the bottom to suggest a bit of dimension, and refined the buttons to give them a more buttony feel. None of these effects really stands out on its own, but when they are all added together, the total is greater than the sum of the parts.

The end results were spectacular, and provides a bold, unified branding for all 4 entities, and paves the way for even greater things to come.