A little bit about the redesign, the how and why

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The biggest motivator for the redesign was to really clean up the site. When I first made the last design I was really happy with the result, however it wasn’t long before the site really outgrew what I wanted the design to do— and it became cluttered, unorganized, and well… not that great.

I like to think that my design abilities have improved since the last round, and I think that is safe to say. This design is cleaner, uses subtle typography, grids, and the rule of thirds. I have emphasized the items I really want to (subscribe, the title, commenting) with out going overboard.

I made the site dark so that the burnt orange can really pop and provide a nice level of contrast. I usually have a strong preference against dark design with white text, especially on a blog where it is copy/content heavy — however I feel the use of whitespace and legible fonts balances this out.

The font is either Gill Sans (for you mac people/adobe users, or Franklin Gothic for you windows people) which is a clean but uncommon set of san-serif fonts. I wanted to move away from the very traditional fonts (arial, helvetica) and the semi traditional (helvetica neue, lucida, trebuchet, etc) but didn’t want to use sIFR. I am a strong believer in enhancing typography with CSS instead of javascript/flash. Almost all headlines have some letter or word spacing tweaks, all be it minor.

Hopefully it accomplishes the job of presenting content and articles with a professional appeal, as that was my goal.

• Author: Ross Johnson
• Date: Friday, March 14, 2008
• Comments: 2 Comments
• Categories:
  • Web Design