David Emery Online

Version 12

26 January 2009

So, the years change, the weather gets colder; time moves on. That means it’s inevitably time for a redesign, no?

Welcome, then, to version 12 of de-online.co.uk!

As you may have noticed by now I’ve gone for a dark background this time round, which I’ve never done round these parts before; I thought it was high time for a bit of a change. I’ve also gone for a bit more of a ‘designed’ look – most previous version have stuck to various combinations of nicely styled boxes but this time I wanted to add a bit of texture (from here) and some slight embellishments (like the ‘curl’ on the end of link-post headers).

With the last version I was always a bit disappointed with the way the type ended up, as it turns out less people had Avenir then I thought so most ended up with italic Helvetica, so this time I’ve liberally used sIFR to make sure everyone sees Trade Gothic where they should be seeing Trade Gothic. What would be good (as maybe a future addition to sIFR) is to be able to detect whether someone has a font already installed, and hence only use sIFR if we really need to… or just have everyone be able to use font-face embedding. Either way…

Also on a type-tip I’ve gone for image-based titles on individual blog posts, so that I can completely customise the look of the headings on a post-by-post basis, without having to wrangle css or sIFR everytime I want to post. I’m really quite happy with the way it’s turned out, especially in conjunction with the large huge images I’m using for the background (see here for a good example).

Anyway, I’m not going to ramble on too much – there’s not a huge amount of point detailing everything that’s different when you can just look at it.

Enjoy!