Design Update!
Hello,
It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted anything on here. I’ve been pretty busy with all of life’s demands, which isn’t bad, but I haven’t written very much.
Part of the reason for my lack of writing is because ever since I put together my previous design, I haven’t really been pleased with it. I had a variety of goals for it that I felt weren’t really acheived. In the mean time, though, I thing I’ve put together a design that I feel a little bit better about. Here are some things you might notice:
- More thorough typographical consideration. I really love and care about my type. In the previous iteration, though, I didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked working it out. I think this version is much better.
- Use of Clarendon. For better or for worse I’m a huge fan of Clarendon. I discovered Clarendon while in school and really began to love it then. My type professor, however, really hated it. Therefore, my love for it grew. (wink, wink). I have had intentions of using it in public work for a while, but haven’t done so till now. How did I do it? Next point…
- Use of typeface-js. Typeface-js is a javascript solution to embedding typefaces on your website. I won’t go in to detail as to how it works, but I will say I am pretty pleased with how easy it was to install and configure. I have previously used sIFR, but I am glad to leave flash behind for this. (I am aware that Cufón might be a more mature project that works similarly, but I found this one first and like it… I might change later if there is significant reason to do so.)
Some things you probably won’t notice without significant digging, but that I’d like to mention:
- One reason I was able to build this theme quickly (by the way, I was able to build this quickly) was because I found a really helpful, stripped-down WordPress theme that serves as an excellent blank canvass for starting new template developments. It’s called Starkers and it was made by Elliot Jay Stocks.
- I used less javascript. I really like javascript. I really dislike, though, features on sites that don’t significantly contribute to the overall user experience but that still take time to load. Therefore, I cut out some javascript effects I used on the previous iteration of this design. (The only javascript I am using is for the earlier mentioned font embedding.)
- This hardly merits mentioning, but in this iteration I didn’t even bother trying to get things to appear right in IE 6. Very few people view this site and a negligable number use IE. It’s simply not worthy my time or effort.
That’s all. Please let me know what you think of the update. If you notice anything that doesn’t look quite right, let me know–I probably missed some stuff.
Rock on,
Rewdy