so i get this email from some guy in New York. he wants me to redo his website. i get a lot of these, but typically they are some kid who wants me to do it for free. anyway, i check out his site and it’s rather bland and boring ( http://www.aladdin-trading.com ).
i get his details - what he wants, what he likes, what he does, etc - and pitch him a price, also adding in that he should prolly’ let me redo his logo. at the time, it was because I wanted to go with a certain “old world” charm on the site, as if they were a trading company that had been around since the 1790s. after discussing this with him, he seemed enthusiastic, and I whipped up this logo:
this was not at all what he wanted. it was too “obvious”, and while he liked the look, he wanted something less representational, more like my own logo. so, I dug into my logo repository. yes, I have a repository of logos that are pretty much faceless, but cool, so they can be adapted to a client if he wants something that means nothing 
so this is what I came up with. intially, my logotype was different (and better, I feel) but was enamored with a really lackluster logo at http://www.colette.com - so he loved the thinner font.
he wants strange things in his site, most of them contradictory to one another (a typical ailment of clients). he’s pitching to 35+ VPs of major food and beverage corporations, yet wanted something like http://www.funkymonkey.com. a great site, but really too “out there” to be a business site.
but, like funkymonkey, he wanted a “mascot” of sorts, so I was directed to look at the styling of sites like funkymonkey.com and simlar, but that he wanted “old world illustrations” of a man carrying bags onto a ship, or bartering with customers :?
so right now I have a couple of calls to illustrators out there for custom illustrations. in the interim I’ve used a temporary image. why this image, because, at funkymonkey, there’s a scene (anime-dream) with a starry night. he wants stars all over his website, possibly shooting back and forth, with a deep, rich, close to midnight blue background.
Oddly enough, he doesn’t want Flash, but all the sites he likes are heavily loaded with flash animations, menus, and layouts.
now I’ve got all this on my plate. he’s a business, and whether he knows it or not, the site he wants is not going to entice big food companies. but, i know that somewhere, within these conflicting concepts, there is a great site. a distinctive identity, that’s not too heavy, not too “corporate”, fun and still capable of instilling confidence in clients.
so far, this is what I have:
I am nowhere near done, i still have the main navigation (going up in the dark area at the top) to do, as well as the footer, and sidebar (most likely a calendar of events, since he’s big on pushing trade shows). I’m not sure about the picture of the earth, but we’ll see.
anyway, i’ll keep you updated as this project moves along 
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