Pitching a Website by Photoshop

When I was about 14 or 15 years old, I got addicted to playing an online game called Cybernations, which bills itself as “a free browser-based nation simulation game.” Back in those days, browser-based games were actually pretty cool, and usually fostered huge online communities that thrived on forum boards and the like. Nowadays, with how much browser technology has improved, games that are static and text-based are far less appealing to the modern gamer, and the fact that Cybernations hadn’t updated its design since I started playing in ’07 didn’t help matters much.

Around late April of 2014, I was starting to look for a big time project to propel myself outside of the smaller projects that I’d worked on up to that point (RJLou and Cardshirt: The Early Days were my prime portfolio pieces back then), and happened to find Cybernations in its worn-down state. It seemed like the perfect opportunity: a game that I had years of experience playing as a kid, a website that was starving for some rejuvenation, and a community still at around 10,000 large. I messaged the owner of the website and told him about my offer, and by some stroke of luck he actually agreed to let me mock something up for him.

Ultimately, the owner never accepted the project, as he felt that the website wasn’t built to be redesigned. On the positive side though, it still turned out to be a pretty interesting case study in how to redesign such a well-established website, how to use Photoshop to do it, and most importantly, how to pitch a redesign to a potential client (and at a few points, what not to say/do when trying to sell that pitch).

Mockups

For reference, you can check out the current design at cybernations.net. Trust me, it probably hasn’t changed since I pitched this back in 2014.

Cover Page

Nation Home Page

Menu Expanded

Searching Your Foreign Aid