David Emery Online

Version 12

30 July 2008

I have – as you have probably noticed unless you’re pottering around the RSS feed – redesigned.

Again.

The last one lasted just under 6 months which, quite frankly, is probably not quite long enough. Oh well. This new one, while obviously a complete visual departure is really an evolution of the last one – it keeps the same fading background setup I wrote last time round, along with all the other major bits and pieces (per post smaller images, twitter status, same sections etc). It really feels like I’m slowly but surely building up quite a code-base round these parts, with all of it easily skin-able and modular.

This design is primarily motivated by two main things – I desire to keep line widths reasonable and to show off the background photos more. The line widths on the previous design were really bugging me – I have slightly fallen out of love with Helvetica at medium sizes (at 14th point it just looks a bit boring to me right now) and the long lines just exasperated that irritation. Hence a much smaller column width and Times as a body text font, with italic Avenir (if you have it, Helvetica if not) for everything else. I’ve also being trying to sneak in italic underlined titles into something for ages and failed, so it was inevitable it would end up on here – I’m shooting for a modern magazine feel, with the large photos, white space and large title treatments.

Technology wise the only thing I’m doing differently is the Flickr integration. I’ve been slightly unhappy with the way the site used to handle Flickr photos for a while, as it would only show the latest 9 and quite often (like if I’d been to a gig) I’d upload a fair few more then that in one go. Coupled with the move of the sidebar down into the footer meant that it moving Flickr photos in the main content area seemed to make sense. So, their will now be aggregate posts of Flickr photos – not each one, but blocks of a few (it’ll wait until their are at least 5 of them before posting) – which seems to make much more sense, especially alongside the new style link posts (which are now treated the same as regular blog posts).

As ever with these redesigns, things may be broken and I haven’t tested in IE yet.

Enjoy.