I wish I could pinpoint just what it is that makes me want to constantly redesign my website. Maybe it stems from a constant need to reinvent myself, that I'm not satisfied with what's come before, that I judge my past work too harshly. I'm not sure if it's a healthy creative practice, or a destructive one. All I know is that right now it's something I can't fight.
And so here I am, putting forth a new version of my site. Visually, it's certainly different from my last version, and I'm not sure if I'm totally satisfied with it yet. Perhaps I'll finally take the advice of other designers going forward, take a more evolutionary approach to my site design rather than a revolutionary one.
The Design
Starting from a base of classic typography, and a loosely grid-based layout, I slowly layered on color and texture. The fonts I'm using are Adobe Garamond Pro and exljbris' Museo Sans. Both are provided via TypeKit. The main body font is good, ol' Verdana.
I'm also trying something I've always wanted to do: rotating color schemes. The design is based off one base color and various shades of one accent color. I have in place color values to rotate that accent color based on the season. As of right now that'll have to be done manually by me. But it's something I'm pretty certain could be coded up in JavaScript. I'll have to dive into that later though, but I'll write up my results when I do.
Personally, I find some sort of visual polish necessary in my designs. Otherwise it just feels unfinished to me. In this design most of that polish takes the form of the subtle background texture. It's a primitive implementation of the Cicada Principle of background image design. But even with my limited understanding of how it works, I've achieved a much more convincing effect than I would have otherwise.
The other touch of polish is seen on the homepage, as a part of the delineation between the showcased post and the latest Work and Journal posts. The icons are a part of a custom set I've been working on and will be releasing in the near future.
The Backend
When I decided I was going to do a drastic redesign, I saw the perfect opportunity to try out a new backend system as well. My previous one, Tumblr, was fine and all but as a geek I wanted a little more control over the way it all worked. I wanted more knobs and levers, more options to tweak.
There certainly aren't a lack of options available to someone looking to build a blog today. I quite happily use Wordpress when I'm writing for AppStorm. And if Movable Type is good enough for John Gruber, I'm sure it'd satisfy my meager needs. But I wanted to try something new with the client-side design of this site, that's why I built it responsively. So why not take the opportunity and try something different on the server-side too.
Around the time that I started making the conceptual decisions about this redesign, Brent Simmon's post about baked blogs was making the rounds. I strongly encourage you read the article, then come back here. That was something I hadn't considered before, a "baked blog". Where blogging was concerned I just assumed that at the very least there was a SQL database involved. But what this technique offered sounded far more interesting, at least to a geek like me.
Then I listened to Episode #18 of Build & Analyze, where Marco and Dan discussed this same thing. The arguments Marco made for why that style of blogging system intrigued him, really hit home with me. I ended up incorporating much of what they discussed on the and the episode to follow.
I settled on [Stacey] as the baked blog system to build with. It's got its quirks, but a small band of eager developers are still working on it. I like it. I like that it's a little different, that it isn't a "mainstream" blogging platform. While building this site, I noticed that there aren't a ton of articles written about Stacey. I aim to correct that. I'm going to document my experience setting up this site, and what I think others trying to do the same would need to know.
More to Come
I'm pretty bad with conclusions. Unless they're poetic and write themselves, I usually ramble on too long, and end up chopping them off mid-thought. That's kind of happening here. I hope this redesign is a start to something great. There will be more to come. My relationship to writing and the Web is just beginning. There's most definitely more to come. Promise.