Eva Monkey Version 4 Redesign
By The Eva Monkey on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017
I started Eva Monkey over fifteen years ago. And to be perfectly honest, it seems like ages ago at this point. The very earliest incarnation of Eva Monkey, if you could call it that, was on a personal Tripod page I built at the end of 2001. It was a section called “Evangelion Dissected”, and I cringe whenever I look back on it. It’s not the content itself that bothers me, as there was almost none to speak of, but the fact that, in my youth, I thought lime green Comic Sans text on a dark blue background was a good idea. I frequently say that I “like to think I’ve grown as a designer over the years”, however digging up my old Tripod page does really hit home the fact that yes… yes I have.
In the early days of Eva Monkey, I decided that I wanted to periodically redesign the website, and possibly change graphics and color scheme from time to time, in order to keep things fresh. The first version of Eva Monkey (“Red Cross”) began on a Keenspace account in the summer of 2002, and was replaced on the first anniversary of Eva Monkey existing on its own domain. This new version (“Cold Gaze”) represented a pretty substantial improvement in myself as a designer. The next version, (“Version 3”) wasn’t anything to write home about, but it had a minimal aesthetic that I think I appreciated at the time. It’s from here that I got lazy with the design of Eva Monkey. In all, version 3 went through an additional three variations, denoted as “True”, “Truer”, and “True Squared”, in the spirit of the three edits of the Death portion of Death & Rebirth. There was a completely new design in there somewhere, however it got abandoned for reasons that I can’t recall.
Over the past five years, the design of Eva Monkey has remained exactly the same, so I redesigned and redeveloped Eva Monkey from scratch as part of a broader brand identity. I’m really pleased with how this new version (“Version 4”) turned out, it has a number of dedicated features that the prior version was sadly missing, such as social media icons, search feature, callouts, and so on. And, in particular, I’m relieved that Eva Monkey is finally fully responsive, so it should look great regardless of what device you’re using.
In closing, while I don’t have any plans on redesigning Eva Monkey anytime soon. I do hope it doesn’t take another 5-10 years.