design

First we did a redesign of our logo, then we evolved the application design to make it even easier to use, and now finally we release a new website that ties it all together beautifully.

We are still fleshing out some of the content, so if you have a great photo of a Guestlist event or want to be a featured customer, shoot us an email.

We are in the process of creating a brand new website for Guestlist and figured it may be helpful to share some of our design process. Since our launch more than a year ago much has changed in how we see Guestlist and our place in the event registration market. The new website will communicate what we are about more clearly and also allow for some new feature additions.

The Guestlist design process, and really my design process since I am the only one doing design, is pretty simple. I don’t see design as a science. My design is largely driven by gut instinct. What this means in practical terms is that in order to get to a great design you need to go through a whole lot of mediocre and bad designs.

I am not suggesting making ten different versions and picking the best—that would be a colossal waste of time. Rather, a single design is reworked and refined until you find something that makes you think Yes!. A lot of work may be thrown away or abandoned along the way to perfection. Or, you might stumble upon something awesome on your first try.

The new homepage took two weeks to get to a final design, but only 4.5 hours of actual work. Why the discrepancy? If you stare at the same design for extended periods of time things will start to blend together. Sleeping on a design for a day or two will allow for a fresh look.

As the design for the new website comes along we will share some of the design thinking behind what we are doing.

This is a guest post by Verne Ho from Jet Cooper

From time to time, Jet Cooper works with a group that has already done such a phenomenal job building a user experience that our only job is to carry it forward into another form. Arguably bigger shoes to fill, but a challenge we welcomed when our first conversations with Jaco, Ben and Justin from the Guestlist crew started.

In early March, initial brainstorming and conceptualization started around an identity refresh for Guestlist. We understood from the get-go that we wanted something simple and subtle that resonated with the friendly and people-oriented personality they had already established. Naturally, the new mark also had to encompass the smart, casual and social aura that had come to be synonymous with Guestlist-driven events. Easy as pie (or not).

Our approach revolved around finding ways to intelligently integrate a set of imagery and symbolisms that had emerged from early discussions into the wordmark. Location pins, doorways, folding chairs, podiums, name tags and speech bubbles were ideas that stood out. We vetted a handful of concepts by the Guestlist team through several rounds of sketches and inevitably agreed to further explore speech bubbles, folding chairs and podiums as digital comps.

It didn’t take long before we all agreed to drop the chairs and podiums and focus on an interesting arrangement of speech bubbles that we had stumbled upon in earlier rounds. The concept was intriguing - two opposing speech bubbles coming together to form a ‘g’. We had early hesitations around using imagery as cliche as speech bubbles, but we eventually fell in love with the subtlety of the execution. We also realized that not everybody would necessarily see the speech bubbles initially, which further deepened our affection for the concept.

Early versions of the ‘double bubble’ were much more subtle than the finished product. The pointers were much smaller, which made the ‘g’ a lot more prevalent. We liked this, but were concerned over its scalability as the bubbles became indistinguishable at smaller sizes. We eventually found a healthy balance between the size of the pointer and the play between the ‘conversation’ and the ‘g’. Woot!

For the typeface, despite trying a few alternatives, we ended up sticking with the Haptic Bold family, though opted to go sans-italics as it meshed better with the ‘g’ we had designed. Haptic is great for its ability to convey a warm and playful personality and simply felt right as the typeface behind the original Guestlist identity.

For us, Guestlist represents a genre of events that bring together a collective of smart, young and incredibly inspiring professionals. Those events are often best remembered by the conversations that took place with those people, which is exactly why we think the new mark’s focus on conversation is a step in the right direction.

Though a lot of work went into the process, the end result is a subtle refresh that retains a lot of the brand’s familiarity. We’re very pleased with the final product and feel privileged to have our work grace the face of such a bright and inspiring product. It was an absolute pleasure working with Jaco, Ben and Justin through the process and we’re both anxious and stoked to see how it will be received by the community. We hope you like it!