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.