BluZúl Linguistics
I just finished designing and rolling out a Website for my brother in-law Alan. I didn't really need to do it, nor was I asked too, but as I am currently working on my design skills and thought it would be a good Christmas present. He gets a site, and I get to play around with design and try out using a new CMS. I went with Concrete5 this time over drupal because it is just so much simpler to use and even rollout. So far I am extremely happy with it, and am considering switching my site over to it (currently using drupal).
As far as the project went, I started by creating a logo with the site's primary purpose in mind, found my colors on the Kuler project, and got really frustrated by a nasty bug in Inkscape for creating patterns. It always puts whitespace around the repeated tiles and so matching up your tile with this seemingly random amount of whitespace was just painful. After I was happy with the Fall color/tile logo I went through and mod-ed the default theme for Concrete5. This was actually simple and easy to pick up as opposed to some of the painfulness in Drupal, and just heaven compared to trying to customize a Trac site.
After I got that layout all happy, I created a favicon by simply using the tile pattern out of the logo. This was one of the easiest icons I've ever done.