New Look
For quite some time now I have been playing with the thought of redesigning. There was nothing wrong with the old design - since it was very close to being a carbon copy of the site of a real web designer - but it’s healthy to give a web site a new look every now and then.
After reading Jason Beaird’s book “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” I had all kinds of exciting ideas for the design: Badges, round corners, gradients and all the other goodies that make up a genuine web 2.0 design.
But let’s face it. I’m not a web designer - and I don’t have PhotoShop, which is the de facto standard when it comes to graphics software for web designers. There is always the GIMP, but no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, it’s a major pain in the ass unless I spend a month to get used to the interface. On top of this, I think I’m esthetically color blind. I’m able to see all colors, I’m just not able to combine and match them in an esthetically pleasing manner. So I’m sticking to black, white and a third color for the links.
Here is the new design, a result of about six hours of work on Friday evening and night. I’ve made some notable changes, for instance changed both the font face and the size of the font, stripped the sidebar of most of its content, moved the one-liners from the bottom of the page to the header, created a moblog bar and generally simplified everything. Perhaps the most notable change is the “read more” link on all the entries on the front page. It’s there to keep the front page from growing too large, but I’m not really sure if I’ll keep it.
Anyway, I enjoyed creating the new design and I hope you enjoy using it.
Feedback
Do you have any thoughts you want to share? A question, maybe? Or is something in this post just plainly wrong? Then please send an e-mail to vegard at vegard dot net with your input. You can also use any of the other points of contact listed on the About page.
DinoI am very pleased! Vegard, you’ve done a great job - the site looks excellent! Oh, and a question: Is it just my monitor or declining mental health - or have you done something to the title (where it reads www.vegard.net) that is making it appear out-of-focus? It is slightly nausea-inducing.. Maybe I should drink less crappy coffee.
swmpNicely done Veggie!
Thumbs up from both a hard core critic and someone who actually known how to use PhotoShop and use it well? It makes me a happy man!
Yeah, the logo looks a little blurry, it’s a screenshot from Opera. I could need a better logo. Genius, now that you’re back in Sweden, you probably have way too much time on your hands. Are you up for the task?
Asbjørn UlsbergI know I don’t love it, but it’s still good. It gets the job done, kind of. Well done. :-)
