Yesterday afternoon, I pushed live a new theme for the site which I had been working on for the past few months. Most of the design elements were realized over the course of just a week or so, but I always sit with a new design for a few months as a way of trying it on. What I want to know is simple: after a few months, which one do I like looking at better?
About two weeks ago I was itching to get the new design out, because the old one just didn’t feel right any longer. So there’s a few notes I want to pass along for you on this new design:
- I encourage you to check out the archives page, as it underwent a substantial overhaul. Previously, I spit everything at you, and the page was insanely slow to load. Now it is much faster with hopefully much more helpful breakouts. Including recent posts, listings by year or month, categories, and my favorites.
- I dropped Hoefler’s Chronicle typeface, in favor of Whitney. Chronicle didn’t fit the aesthetic I was looking for, and while Gotham looked amazing, as did Forza (I was really close to using this, but it felt way too cramped to read), neither actually read well. Whitney is lovely, if a bit over used these days.
- I changed the site search. In the past I’ve used WordPress’ default search engine, and SearchWP — I was not happy with either. And when I wanted to search my own site, I used DuckDuckGo. So I just defaulted to that, again. It’s way better, sorry about that.
- My subheadings I write are still visible as such on the main index of the site, but on each post they act as tl;dr text. I think that’s “fun”.
- I am particularly proud of the footer.
This design was a long time coming, anyone who has been around long enough will probably notice this when I point it out: I’ve slowly been removing the red from the site for 7 years now. The red always felt limiting to me, and while color is nice — I can tell you designing this without color was substantially harder. It’s not perfect, but I’ll slowly tweak it around over time.
If you see anything amiss, just drop me a note. Thanks for your time, I now return you to my normal rants.