Redesigning (again)

I’m work­ing on a new design for this blog, of course, because that’s one of the only things I do with my free time. I had made some head­way before I dis­cov­ered Bub­b­lesSOC. I really admire this design and hope now to take a lot of things from it. I’m not really into the col­ors or the per­sis­tent “About Me” header or the illus­tra­tion, but upon close inspec­tion you have to con­cede that its lay­out is impec­ca­ble. It’s easy to nav­i­gate and is content-rich while still being min­i­mal. None of the con­tent is shoved in your face too much at any one time. What I also like is that it invites post­ing from the author; even though only the most recent post is excerpted on the front page, it doesn’t dom­i­nate the real estate of the site. Ordi­nar­ily I avoid Ver­dana, but here it works really well. It also pos­sesses visual depth with­out rely­ing on the traps that so many con­tem­po­rary Word­Press designs fall vic­tim to, save for the “Tags” ‘tag,’ which aside from being cliché is also frankly kind of ugly here, espe­cially with that ‘stitch­ing’ on its bor­der. And the whole thing val­i­dates XHTML–strict! I don’t think I’m even capa­ble of cod­ing an XHTML-strict site. Plus the one I’m work­ing on in the mean­time is arguably too bold for my taste. Granted I’ve only begun on single.php, so maybe my home.php can apply a lot of lessons from BubblesSOC.

Keep an eye out for an upcom­ing post on the five web design trends that need to die in 2009.