We created Visions of Brahma as a portfolio and design service website in 2009. The name came from the visionary nature of our work and our resonance with the Hindu Creator deity Brahma, who represents students, artists, the youthful and those that create. For a time it was a good representation of our work online, and we often developed the site to make it better.

This post is a tribute to the website we used for over a year before discovering our true brand in The Astrarium, and an overview of some of the interesting designs we came up with along the way.

As many designers know, the most difficult projects are the ones for yourself. Finding the right business name, brand, and image is very important, and it took us quite some time to find The Astrarium, which is just the right name to describe what we do. Before the Astrarium, there was Visions of Brahma and A Quiet Forest. See our post about A Quiet Forest’s Lifecycle to see some of our older websites.

Here are the various incarnations of Visions of Brahma durings its heyday, leading up to the creation of the Astrarium in April 2010.

This was one of the first layouts, mostly focused on web design services but also featuring artwork in the form of products. This layout, while still quite nice, was a bit too expansive. We set out to create something more grounded and contained.

This version, still largely focused on web design services, used a new background image that found its way into many incarnations of this site. It still needed some improvement though.

At this point in the process, we crafted the new categories browsing method we use now on this web site. At the time we had five categories, and a layout somewhat similar to my site today.

A home page design we created with a new and more vibrant version of the background image, to make the site pop more.

Final version of the home page design with new background and categories browsing, and the last one to be used before we developed the concept for The Astrarium.

If you’re thinking about hiring us for your own web site, and this article turned you off, don’t worry. We don’t usually work like this. Many of our clients say the layout we come up with is spot on the first time, and the revisions are up to you from there on out. It’s just that it’s very difficult to create a personal web site at times, and we also struggled with how to organize the site, as we were creating something totally new. This was a process that evolved over several weeks into the site you see today. We were guided in just the right ways to make each change in layout and organization, and it turned out beautifully.