I just moved over to wordpress so the old posts are missing for the time being but I shall be uploading them again soon.
I know the site only went live about a fortnight ago but I have decided that because the design just wasn’t ‘me’ enough, and also because the cms it was running on is just not ready for public consumption I have decided to move over to wordpress and give the site a bit of a make-over whilst I’m at it.
I hope you enjoy the new look
Posted: 08/8/08 12:51 PM
Filed Under: Design Sandwich
LaurenMarie - Creative Curio - August 8th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
So are you liking WP better?
This new design is definitely clean. Is it completely built by you or did you start with another theme (like mine was built off Sandbox)?
So, speaking of contrast from my post on it, I think yours could do with a little more contrast in the font sizes. You’re almost (and here I put my thumb and forefinger about a cm a part) pushing big type sizes, but I think they are not quite big enough in some parts! It would also be great to see some sans serif mixed in to help with contrast.
There are some well designed sites out there that are pure typography (I see you already read iLT, so check out some of the excellent examples of web typography John’s showcased). See SEGD for some inspiration, too. Sander just redesigned his site about a month ago and did a great job with the type, imho.
I think this new design is 95% there; just a few more tweaks to get it perfect! Great job, David!
inspirationbit - August 8th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
It’s always nice to discover readers of iBit by coming across other sites where InspirationBit is listed in the BlogsIRead section. Thank you!
I haven’t seen your previous design, David, so I have nothing to compare the new one with, but I rrrrreally like this layout. A bit confused though: is this site running WordPress or not? (you first said you “moved over from wordpress” and then “decided to move over to wordpress”)
I do agree with Lauren, there’s not enough contrast between various parts of the content, but otherwise it’s a very clean classy design. Well done.
David - August 8th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
@ Lauren – I am really loving Wordpress, I only just used for the first time on a clients website recently but I found it so easy to tweak and mess with that I decided to use it for my own site. Plus if you had ever seen the back-end to the old design you would understand the need for a change.
The design is a bit of both actually - I used Elliot Jay Stocks’ Starkers theme, but that’s less of a theme and more of a giant CSS reset for Wordpress so the design is built up from scratch really.
Thanks for the suggestions by the way. I agree with the need to make the font-sizes a touch bigger in places there’s not quite the right balance between the various headings.
I was also toying with the idea of using a sans-serif for the sidebars but I have a bit of an unhealthy aversion to sans-serif typefaces so it will require some consideration before I settle on one.
@ inspirationbit - This is exactly what that twitter post in the header is about – I have corrected the mistake now, thanks for picking it up :)
Just to clarify i have just switched to Wordpress.
I wouldn’t expect many people to have seen the previous design, it was up for all of about a week, but the design itself had been in existence for about a year and it just wasn’t working for me.
The site needs some tweaking for sure, but I’m glad you’re liking it so far
Thanks again for the kind words