One last post
It’s time for a little post-mortem on the 2005 redesign of this site. When I designed it, I was very proud. It was vastly superior to the layout it replaced (which stayed in place for less than a year), and to its credit, it demonstrated a lot of attention to detail. It also established a consistent visual theme for Distantly Yours as a creative studio, which was a very important hurdle to overcome at the time. However, there are a number of shortcomings that I know need to be addressed in a redesign.
Odd color choices
I don’t know if I designed this site on a bad laptop monitor, or what. Cyan on white? What was I thinking?! I clearly needed to add a lot more blue to increase the contrast against the white background.
Additionally, when I originally launched the site, the text was way too pale. I believe it was #ccc, which, against a white background, just isn’t going to fly. I eventually darkened it down to #888, roughly 50 percent gray, but I think it needs even more contrast to increase readability.
Hiding the search bar
Admittedly, the search bar was an afterthought. It’s aesthetically pleasing in its presentation, but from a usability standpoint, putting it at the bottom of the page was downright stupid.
Want to contact me? Good luck!
The contact link was even more of an afterthought than the search bar. At least it was implemented with dependable email obfuscation, protecting my address from malicious email harvesting spiders.
Who is this guy, anyway?
Additionally, there isn’t an “About the Author” kind of page, and I can see a lot of people out there feel that’s a very important part of a good blog.
The homepage needs to get its priorities straight
Another big problem is the fact that the homepage gives way too much emphasis on the featured graphic, which changed only once or twice in the past three years.
The blog content, while certainly looking less attractive than a graphic, needs to play a bigger role on the page. Additionally, we read text from top-to-bottom, necessitating a shift away from horizontal layout, to something more vertically-oriented.
Restrictive headline and excerpt layout
For three years now, I’ve written headlines and article excerpts and then checked to see how they looked in the layout, to make sure I’d typed just the right amount. That’s just not very good design, in my opinion. A blog is, in many ways, a celebration of free-form publishing. To require that much precision from the writer is to miss the point of the blog as a writing form.
Redesign launching soon
I’ve been working for a few weeks now on designing and building a new version of this site. It takes into account all of the above criticisms, as well as addressing a few other issues as well. Most of all, though, I do not feel that the 2005 redesign truly reflects my level of skill as a designer, and that is, perhaps, one of the most important functions of a designer’s website.
I still see the 2005 redesign as an important milestone in my design career. It was a noteworthy increase in design quality over what I had done before, and it gave me the confidence to seek time as a full-time web designer.
I’ll definitely be saving screen shots of it to look back on.
Dan Hiester
Whitney