The Obligatory Blog

My Elephant

I spent a crazy amount of time looking for a graphic to use on this website when I relaunched it.

It had to be representative of what I do as a web designer, but nothing too cliched or obvious.

I wasn't ruling out photographs per se, but my gut feeling was that an illustration would be better. Less specific and more open to being adapted for use in different contexts across the site.

I'd seen origami used on a few other sites for general illustrative purposes. Paper planes looked popular and had the right dynamic vibe I want to convey as a web designer. But it had been done before, was somehow still a bit cold, non-personal, suggestive of being international - exactly the opposite of my aim of wanting to work with local Exeter based organisations.

Then I stumbled onto the origami elephant. A character I'm calling Mphant (for no particular reason). With a bit of colour tweaking he fits in really well with the look of the Mekonta website (the green, is the one constant that has stayed the same since I started Mekonta back in 2004).

Plus Mphant does represent the core values of Robust, elegant & handmade webdesign.

I was still a bit dubious at first but have really grown to like him, and I have big plans for Mphant's appearance across this site now.

Posted by John Cowen - a web designer in Exeter working under the name Mekonta. If you liked this article, subscribe.