A New Year and a new Design
Well, the title of the post is fairly self explanatory. As you can see I have decided to give this blog a complete refresh, infact I’m not so sure I can even call it a blog anymore now that I have introduced my portfolio once again but more on that later.
At the turn of the year I decided that it was time to refresh things on this site, the previous design had been present since it was pushed live in August 2009. But if the truth be told, I was never really that happy with it. In the end I felt that the last design iteration just didn’t fall in line with my own "personal brand" that I had created with the previous iterations. My specification for this site has always been simple; clean with plenty of white space, the design conforming to use of a strict grid, use of whites and greys and the typography being the main focus point, I didn’t want my design to be shifting the users focus away from what they were looking at; whether that was a blog post or part of my portfolio. Ultimately, I felt my last design fell down at a few of these hurdles.
One of the main reasons I decided to push through this redesign so quickly was because I have decided to take part in Project 52 and for that reason I have decided to move the style of this blog back to being more content focused. The content area is now much larger than the previous design, almost twice the size.
However, in my urgency to get things pushed through, I’ve still got many loose ends to tie up, so please bear with me whilst I get on with them. Some of the things at the top of my list are; styling of comments, getting my portfolio section up and running and refining my HTML5 code, as this was a bit slap dash and can definately be improved. Infact, I felt that my HTML5 code in the last design was spot on, one of it’s redeeming features. If you can think of anything that needs urgent attention then please feel free to get in touch with me.
On the logo front, as I know this will cause some controversy, let me explain. Those of you who have been regular visitors to this site will have no doubt become accustomed to my laurel logo but for this design I have decided to switch to a laurel wreath as made famous by the tennis clothing brand Fred Perry, as you can see the resemblance is quite close. I would like to design my own laurel to use for my personal brand but for now I think I’ll be sticking with this one.
Oh, I’ve also finally got round to incorporating Typekit, after buying it some six months ago and check it out in a webkit browser, you might find a couple of little surprises within.
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Who I am
My name is Jack Osborne and I am a Glasgow–based designer and writer. You should follow me on Twitter.
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What I do
I am a front-end developer with proficiency in; accessibility, design, semantics, usability & web standards.
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Where I do it
I am currently working freelance and I am available for hire. Feel free to get in touch with me if you fancy a chat.
Really like the new design Jack, the main paragraph type looks lovely. Not sure about your spinning logo though
Minimalism is working for you, Osborne. And thanks for enlightening me on fancy web kit gradients.
I like it, Jack. Cracking work. Apparently, on your about page, you ARE a Greenock
Sounds like something out of a Harry Potter book 
@Rick – Thats just a bit of fun, although it stills needs some tweaking, the house logo is miles off on a bigger screen, my bad.
@Ashley – Thank you
@Richard – Well spotted, I think I jiggered something up when I reimported the database, seems that I hadn’t closed off a link properly.
I like it, though I am not keen on the text when it gets to the lower third of the gradient. It is quite difficult to read the footer, the labels on this comment form and (when not in commenting mode) the end of an article. Apart from that, good job mate
@Mike – Yeah, thats been pointed out by Dr. Henley. It’s something I’ll definately have to look at. To be honest, there’s still lots of tweaking to be done on the site but I just felt the need to push it live asap. I’ll need to see if I can add another colour on the gradient when it gets to the bottom.
Oh, you’ll also be pleased to know that your lovely piece of custom php for my archives page still have pride of place
Nice work Jack. It looks a fair bit better in Safari than Firefox. I like the minimalism. The only thing I would say is that I agree with Mike about the gradient. It becomes hard to read in the lower third. Other than that very nice.
This design is absolutely gorgeous, viewing it in a webkit browser is a pleasure.
Yowzers! I didn’t know this was live just yet. Lovely work, Jack. I’d agree that a subtle tweak to the darkness of the gradient will put this over the top. Webkit loves you!