Back in the Habit
I put all that work into producing this web design, and then I didn’t do anything with the site. “What a waste of time,” you’re thinking, right?
Distantlyyours.com has been seeing a lot of domain name resolution issues in the past eight months or so, and I was so busy with classes, I didn’t have time to go through the hassles of fixing those problems, whether through checking with tech support or by tracking down another webhost.
Thankfully, these issues seem to be resolved. I hope this lasts. Because I’m beginning work on yet another redesign.
Why change?
What’s wrong with the design I launched last fall? Plenty.
Everything in the layout is horizontally oriented, whereas large bodies of text are vertically oriented. There just weren’t enough vertical elements in the layout to keep it afloat. Even the links to recent articles were horizontal.
When I did the fall 2004 layout, my top priority was the design portfolio, which I assumed was about to undergo some exciting expansions. Well, it hasn’t. I should have put more priority on the blog content, as that actually has more potential for being updated.
Another problem was that I buried the blog content “under the fold.” That blue swooping shape thingy looks great, but it would look better on a Coke can than on a website. Maybe as a background to a website header or something. Hmmmm, maybe I should experiment with that.
Finally, having a fixed background makes the site scroll way too slowly. It’s not right for a website to tax someone’s CPU that heavily and not have anything to show for it.
Current process
The new layout seems to be coming along well.
I’ve skethed a lot of it out on notecards, which has been fun. I’ve figured out that if I fold notecards in certain ways, I get straightedges that help me draw lines an exact distance away from the edge of a card. For example, one card I have folded into thirds, along the long edge; it’s a 3×5 card, so when it’s folded into thirds, it’s one inch wide. I can use this technique to make a 3×3 square with 1 inch margins on either side. Then I have another card folded into quarters onto which I’ve drawn a page header. That way, all I do is put the “header” card right next to the “body” card on the table, and I have reusable visual components for my designs.
From there, I’m taking my ideas and playing with them in Fireworks, because that’s what Jon Hicks uses. So far, I like it a lot, because even though you’re saving your work to a PNG file, it still retains all vector data. Unlike Freehand, Indesign or Illustrator, Fireworks keeps all its measurements in pixels; it wasn’t designed for print, it was built from the ground up with the web in mind. Unlike Flash, it shows you what your work will look like in bitmap form after you export, giving me an accurate-to-the-pixel account of how my work will look. So far, I’m very pleased with it as a tool for composing a design.
What to expect
The new design feels to me like a synthesis of a lot of the ideas I’ve absorbed about interface design theory, magazine design, color and popular blog design, all rolled into one. I’ve prioritized the blog content and a recent visual feature; this could be anything from a recent photo to a project from my portfolio. Something that’s new for me, though, is links to other people’s sites, links to categories, and other things like that a lot of other bloggers do. I just never felt compelled to do those things in the past, as if bloggers just use those features to fill up space in their layouts, and nothing more. I’m starting to appreciate the purpose they fulfilll.
I’ve been picking up influences from microsoft.com, brookelyn.org, Doug Bowman’s wesite and a little bit of Shaun Inman’s brilliant site. My site will not look nearly as good as any of these sites when I’m done, but I still believe I will have raised the bar for myself.
As far as content, expect more commentary on other people’s designs, ideas about my own work, and posts on topics a design geek would care about, like software and music. You can also expect a new image viewer that will blow my old image viewer out of the water.
So check back now and then. Exciting times lie ahead.