Nearly a year after I intended to redesign my personal site for Spring 2006 CSS Reboot, I’ve started up again. What happened last time? Life, work, etc.
What you see above (and here) is the latest incarnation of the design. For comparison purposes, here’s an early iteration of last year’s model.
My standard high contrast avatar is now the site’s ‘logo’. Consistent branding being a concept hammered into my brain on a daily basis. The logo may or may not harbour an easter egg at some point (you’ll just have to wait and see). A slightly tracked Gill Sans Bold now pops as the headline face (at least for Mac users) and Lucida Sans remains for body copy and typographic incidentals. What the Windows user will see has yet to be decided, but it will probably be a heavier weight of Arial or some such utility-grade sans serif.
The predominant use of whitespace in the previous design has been replaced by darker framing elements. A simple “sheet of white paper on a surface” look.
So what makes me think that I can actually launch this design before the next CSS Reboot? This one was built directly in code, not Photoshop. Barring any IE6/7 snafu-shas during tweaking, it’ll happen.
Comments? Please.
Sunny says:
This design needs tons of chicklets on every post. How will anybody be able to find your site if you don't have gigantic glowing chicklets?
Grant Hutchinson says:
Chiclets? You mean like social bookmarking chiclets? Or a shiny pile of superfluous Web 2.0 pseudo sexiness?
Sunny says:
Nothing says classy like a full list of buttons for BlinkBits, BlinkList, Blogmarks, Buddymarks, CiteUlike, Connotea, del.icio.us, Digg it, Earthlink, FeedMarker, Flog this!, Feedmelinks, Furl, Give a Link, Gravee, igooi, Lilisto, Linkagogo, Linkroll, ma.gnolia, Maple.nu, My-Tuts, Netvouz, Newsvine, Onlywire, RawSugar, reddit, Scuttle!, Shadows, Simpy, Spurl, Taggly, tagtooga, TalkDigger, Wink, Yahoo MyWeb, Google, Diigo, Netscape, DZone , Squidoo, Looklater, RecommendzIt, Segnalo, StumbleUpon, Mr. Wong running down the side of your site. Oh sorry I think I'm having a work flashback.
Grant Hutchinson says:
My sympathies. Sounds like you need AddThis.
says:
Whitespace? You? What ARE the odds... I'm looking forward to the reveal.
Grant Hutchinson says:
Michael says:
I have to say I like the current design better. It's grown on me. The new one doesn't seem to have any character. It just looks so...PostScript c. 1986. (sorry!)
Dialog says:
it looks like a xerox. from the future.
Grant Hutchinson says:
Considering PostScript technology was very much treated like a ‘Xerox from the future’ back in the early ‘desktop puddling’ days ... I’d have to agree with both those comments. To be honest Michael, the current design has grown on me too ... and perhaps that’s the problem with it. I have become so used to it, I don’t feel compelled to do anything with it - or the site. The great thing about this CSS-based design is that I can easily modify and tweak chunks of it - gradually or all at once. The current state of the site and it’s structure doesn’t allow me to do that. And web design is all about iteration, feedback and improvement.
Morgan Aldridge says:
Looks like it'll be good, although this design has grown on me as well. I like to see more people working in grayscale and with high-contrast avatars!
Arne says:
The old design has more character and somehow some "house" colors like the orange. Perhaps you can tweak the current style and make things slightly larger. Otherwise all is fine and clean IMO.
Grant Hutchinson says:
I may end up tweaking the colour palette to reflect the look of the current site a bit more, as the main reasons for this redesign were to get freshen things up and to restructure the atrocious template code. One thing I have been thinking about is offering 'skin' options, so you could pick which colour scheme you prefer. Now, to get this damn thing launched.
says:
Wow, it's so much better.
Don't rush now--spend six months refining the background gradation endpoints.
Grant Hutchinson says:
At the rate I’m going, it may take another six months to get this version launched anyway.
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