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.