I’ve got a new launch for you today! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on my good friend Bethany Owen’s new branding and website. We put the final touches — for now — on the website yesterday, and it is now ready for public consumption.

I had a blast working on this project. It ate my work brain for a few days, and it turns out that’s a great way to work! Lauren may be onto something there. One of the many upsides to working with a friend who actually trusts you is the freedom to experiment, and it was particularly convenient after my new (2013 release, inexpensive and 50% off on Amazon) Bamboo Pad arrived.

The thing about my obsession with hand-written logos (I’ve done a few before, though my clients ended up going with another option) is that my handwriting is terrible. Also, I pick up pens weird. But it’s fun, and it’s great to be able to write straight into Illustrator and use its brushes and play around with it instead of fingerpaint on my tiny phone screen like I used to do. That’s how I drew my blog signature and my own portfolio logo.

Another thing I got to do was suggest Squarespace to Bethany. I’d been wanting to try out that platform for a while; you may have noticed it’s got really popular among designers lately, and I love the look and portfolio functionality of it. I’m absolutely not ready to switch myself, for various reasons, but I can see the appeal. It’s very intuitive, the templates are gorgeous, and you can do certain things — like set up Disqus and Google Analytics, add a slider, lay out a page template, put in a gallery block, or connect a mailing list — with a quick copy/paste in the settings, whereas on WordPress you need a plugin and then some.

It also has a space for custom CSS, though this time I didn’t use it. The standard options turned out a beautiful website, but I’m definitely curious to learn how to change more of it. Still, one of the reasons I love self-hosted WordPress is the control and sheer access you have to the bowels of your site, and I missed that on Squarespace.

But overall, I absolutely see why so many people use it and I’m very happy I decided to offer it as an option in my design packages.

Visit Bethany Owen Makeup

“I hoped to achieve a professional, modern and easy to navigate website, new logo and new creative branding. Lix created an incredible hand written logo and it was so much fun to go through the different options, colours and ways of writing until we decided on something perfect!

The process was smooth start to finish. Lix had incredible communication from the off and we surpassed everything I hoped for. The overall experience was wonderful.”

— Bethany, Bethany Owen Makeup

Have a browse* and let us know what you think!

PS: if you’re interested in working with me, you can see more of my work right here on my portfolio. Feel free to have a look at the packages I offer and get in touch!

* Not to be a show-off, but if you dig deep enough you’ll find my face in there. ;)