Redesign Thoughts

I have star­ted work on a redesign of this blog, this post is to refine my thoughts and eli­cit your opin­ions on what is good, mem­or­able or just damn ugly about this blog.

Why

The cur­rent design was a rushed proof of concept, it is untidy and a few things annoy me, par­tic­u­larly the typography.

Identity

The col­our pal­ate, the excess­ive use of orange and the orange star have be com­men­ted on a num­ber of times. So I intend to keep these fea­tures, they may be mem­or­able for the wrong reas­ons, but they uniquely identify this blog.

Col­our palate

There will be subtle changes, even the addi­tion of another col­our. How­ever, the dom­in­ance of orange will remain.

Logo

The orange star has gone from being a design ele­ment to my logo by acci­dent or bad design, so it will remain, might even get a tshirt with it on for SXSW (yes more shame­less self promotion).

Fluid Elastic design

This is eas­ily the most con­tro­ver­sial part of the design. I get more com­ments on this than any all the other design ele­ments com­bined. The most com­mon that my font size is too big.

After spend­ing the last couple of months using a laptop with a 15 inch screen at 1600 by 1200 and refus­ing to change the res­ol­u­tion just to browse web sites, I appre­ci­ated this fea­ture and expect that most of the increas­ing num­ber of vis­it­ors using high res­ol­u­tion laptops do to.

I will make a num­ber of changes:

1. Not to change the font size when vis­it­ors have set­tings dif­fer­ent from default.
2. Let vis­it­ors set their own pre­ferred font size for the site.
3. When visitor’s have their browser set to a let­ter box format (the browser win­dow is much wider than high). The font size will be rel­at­ive to browser height.

Typography

This needs improv­ing, I have been read­ing Mark Boulton, Richard Rut­ter and NorthTemple on typo­graphy and gain­ing inspir­a­tion from their stylesheets.

I have already done most of the work on the typo­graphic stylesheet, you will see far more con­sist­ent ver­tical height of all typo­graph­ical ele­ments and this will carry over to other ele­ments of the design and graph­ical elements.

Layout

I will move to a three column lay­out, to pro­duce a con­sist­ent nav­ig­a­tion and look across the site. Cur­rently dif­fer­ent page type: home page, post and archives all have slightly dif­fer­ent nav­ig­a­tion and a dif­fer­ent look and feel.

Theme

The cur­rent blog relies on a mod­i­fied Kubrick theme. I have a few issues, regard­ing the semantics and SEO assump­tion made by the cre­at­ors of Kubrick and while the Kubrick theme is good, Sand­box is bet­ter for what I need. Though it will be mod­i­fied to suit my needs.

Flash

The use of Flash for scal­able vec­tor images will prob­ably increase, how­ever this will require the use of iframe shims to resolve the issue of lay­er­ing Flash and HTML with Mac and *nix Flash plugins.

Flashb­lock

This plu­gin for Fire­fox, causes some prob­lems with SWFob­ject, which I use to insert flash images when the cor­rect ver­sion of Flash is installed. Flashb­lock removes the flash image after SWFob­ject has replaced the altern­ate con­tent. How­ever, as Flashb­lock requires Javas­cript to func­tion, I should be able to use Javas­cript to reverse this.

Advertising

There will be unob­trus­ive advert­ising, not because I need or want to make money with this blog, it was the res­ult of read­ing Brian Clark of Copyblogger&#8217s what&#8217s in it for you.

Work to do

I am cur­rently done most of the design work with pen and paper, it is the case of put­ting it together with a com­puter. I still need to learn about iframe shims, rewrite the Javas­cript that does the font siz­ing and write the Javas­cript to handle FlashBlock.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 10:45 am and is filed under blogging, css and html, elastic design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.