2 Little Rosebuds

2 Little Rosebuds is a blog written by my wife Wendy Rose. The site started as a place for her to post about our twin girls and morphed into an outlet for her growing addiction to subscription boxes.

My responsibilities on the site include:

• Wordpress installation and maintenance.
• Creative, theme design, and development.
• Content management.

Logo design

The 2 Little Rosebuds word mark has gone through several versions over the years. For this iteration I wanted something feminine — with subtle hints at veganism and “the twins,” to relate back to the blog’s identity and subject matter.

Style tiles

For all my projects I like to start with a quick sketch to help capture the overall tone and feel I’m going for. Creating a set of style tiles in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator is my preferred way of doing that. Colors, basic typography, image treatments, and any other design elements I’m toying with all end up here.

Wordpress layouts

With over 3,500 posts in the last eight years, 2 Little Rosebuds has become an authority on all things “subscription box.” My main goals were to keep the experience familiar and to simplify the underlying code and design wherever possible.

This meant keeping the established color palette, but with minor adjustments to maintain adequate contrast for improved accessibility.

Reducing the amount of typefaces used to improve page loading speeds. And combining the masthead, navigation bar, and search form into a single organism to give space back to what’s important — post content.

Post content is given prominence by using a centered single column layout to make reading comfortable. Just Wendy’s words and photographs — no side bar clutter or distracting advertisements.

Layouts used for the directory got a refresher to better showcase the 650 subscription boxes listed within. Search, sort controls, box type refinements, and review scores are placed in familiar locations to help discover subscriptions while browsing.