For a few years I’ve been doing some website design work pro-bono for the notorious Essendon fan site BomberBlitz.com and the time came to redesign the front page again.

Designing for an unofficial version of a popular brand has a lot of limitations. Everything I’ve done for BomberBlitz has to be free of the clubs and sponsors logos. High quality player images are also hard to come by.

However for the first time I thought to turn those challenges on their head. As an unofficial site we could do things perhaps the club could not. For example the team is called the Bombers but the war/violence/bombs theme is never exploited. For obvious reasons! However I wanted to turn this weakness into a strength.

David Zaharakis

So the main feature of the new home page design is a huge motif of players on fire, bombs falling from the night sky and a stealth bomber flying in. It’s over the top, excessive and all by design.

Other than that I gave the layout a cleanup top to bottom and used some custom fonts for headings served up by TypeKit

Projects like these are also good times to try and learn some new skills so it was built on HTML5 just like the latest version of this website so now I’m pretty confident with it.

Overall it’s cleaner at the front, more modern at the back and better all over.