December 2010
9 posts
1 tag
More subtle design shifts
Went back to dark gray text, rather than black. Made post titles black, rather than green. Also, normal weight (not bold). Before:
After:
1 tag
Hurry up!
Just received Dan Cederholm’s new book. Now hurrying to get this redesign to minimum viable launch, so I can comb through all the markup and HTML5ify it, then read Dan’s book and apply some finishing touches.
Renamed sidebar stuff from “Projects and other work” to “See also,” and added Twitter/Dribbble callouts. Done! Got rid of lame stickynote-style boxes just...
Working toward navigation
Spent some time thinking about the nav area. One example of art direction over time. I’m making decisions about this thing now because I need to now. Later I may iterate some more and change things, but I need something to start with.
Iteration 1:
I started by thinking the nav could be a spot for some kind of chunky visual. So I made a button bar. No good. It was distracting in the same...
1 tag
Rough adjustments to projects/features
The sidebar I had going on was a bit overwhelming. It drew too much attention away from the main column. I speculated about somehow having it recede, and then tried a few different things. Darkening the area was problematic because it created new visual boundaries in the composition that made everything feel too complicated. But hiding the images helped (quite a bit!) and lightening the text in...
1 tag
Pilcrow permalink
Added a permalink to bookmark entries. I like how Daring Fireball does permalinks and timestamps. With John’s linked entries (which function like my bookmarks), in stream view, there’s only the linked character, but on permalinked pages there’s a timestamp.
Used Cronos Pro’s pilcrow character for my permalinks. What a great pilcrow. Wish I could link to Cronos’ glyph...
Notes & bookmarks header
Added one more thing: a “notes & bookmarks” heading above the stream of posts (notes) and Pinboard bookmarks. Added a link to the RSS feed here because now subscribers get both (NWT subscribers used to only receive notes).
Still not sure about the text style and spacing, nor am I totally happy about the very light gray rule below this heading. But it felt like it needed to be...
Starting to feel right
Sat down tonight for an hour, by the glow of my freshly cut Christmas tree, and made a handful of extremely subtle adjustments to the Nice Web Type redesign that feel to me like they’ve made a big difference. Here’s what I did. You can toggle between these before and after screenshots if you like.
Black text, rather than gray
For as long as I can remember, I’ve used an...
Quick rant about bookmark handling while looking...