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Glacial Design
Published 3 years ago, at the start of May under Design
Over the past five months I’ve very slowly been working towards a redesign for my personal site. It all began in December when I shut down my old blog due to mountains of comment spam, a general lack of content, and a design I grew to hate. Since then I’ve created a total of six major designs for my blog, with a dozen or so alterations on those designs. Just about all of them were complete flops, but I’d like to air out my dirty laundry a bit.
The major reason behind my decision to redesign was to switch publishing platforms from BBlog to Wordpress to dodge the comment spam. I prefer the template system within BBlog over Wordpress, but I just couldn’t figure out how to stop the spam. Also, I wanted time to think up some content ideas, because I had seriously hit rock bottom.
How bad did it get? Try chocolate biscuit reviews inspired by Stopdesign:
“Tim Tam Overdose”
“Tim Tams are the most amazing chocolate biscuit my taste buds have ever encountered.” […]
“I discovered these awe-inspiring cookies after reading Douglas Bowman’s post, and promptly ordered three boxes” […]
“These things are seriously the cookie equivalent of crack.”
Allow me to extend my apologies to the blogosphere for outputting such garbage (and for my gluttony - I ate a ton of those cookies).
So I threw up a splash page announcing my return in January and went to work. Now, four months later than promised, I managed to limp across the finish line and make the May 1st CSS Reboot. But in the interim, I made a ton of bad designs, some of which I’ll now share with you.
The Original: “Recovering Photoshop Filter Addict”
Created around January 2005, but drastically changed over time with the addition of a side bar, re-designed headers, and some additional accoutrements. At the time I created this steaming pile, I thought it was quite good. But over time, the excessive Photoshop effects and poor use of such a beautiful font as Berthold Akzidenz wore on me.
First Attempt: “teh suck”
I really liked the idea of a distinguished area to showcase the current article. This design achieves that goal, but from an aesthetics standpoint it’s really lackluster. After lots of tweaks to the design, and even the beginnings of an HTML mockup, I let this one go. The only redeeming factor of this design is the use of Sylfaen for the logo type - it’s a gorgeous font.
Second Attempt: “Cannibalism”
After going back to the drawing board, I looked around for some ideas. At the time, a Duke student-run startup I was involved in, The Knowledge Well, completely fell apart. Consequently, the design I so lovingly created for the project became orphaned . I really like this design, so I tried to re-purpose it as a blog design. The result was pure garbage. It lacks the character and color of the design I stole from myself. Lesson learned: Every project is unique.
Third Attempt: “zzzzz”
At this point my domain name unexpectedly expired, because the notification emails wound up in my junk folder. So I grabbed robgoodlatte.com and decided to use my name as my brand. The primary motivation behind this change was to shake off a young and immature image conveyed by using “Ninja” in the brand (FYI: Ninjas are way cooler than pirates). Plus, by using my real name I can attempt to gain some name recognition. I kept the ninja mark but simplified it greatly to make it a better logo. But the design I cranked out to accompany the logo is completely boring, so I kept moving.
Four, Five, and Six: Three mediocre designs in a row
After three flops, I made three designs over a few weeks that I thought were halfway decent. None of them are amazing, but I was able to tweak one of them into my final design, so not all was lost.
After three flops, I made three designs over a few weeks that I thought were halfway decent. None of them are amazing, but I was able to tweak one of them into my final design, so not all was lost.
The final design took the layout of design 4 expanded to a 1024×768 design with a lot more color added. I tweaked that design until the weekend before May 1st, then had a few marathon coding sessions to get it done in time.
Thanks for all the positive feedback in comments and links. I was surprised at how well the design was received at the reboot and the response from everyone has been kick ass.
The response from everyone has been kick ass, because the design is kick ass. Great work!
Yes. Definetly a great design.
How do you do the flash titles? Is there a plugin or hand-made in Flash MX?
The font color on footer of the site is too dark (it’s almost invisible).
Lucian: The titles use sIFR - Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, developed by Mike Davidson, Mark Wubben, and others. You can find out more at http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/
You can also follow the development of sIFR 3 over at http://novemberborn.net/sifr
Thank you Rob!
Man, they’re all good in their own ways. I really like the 2 before this one, but I can obviously see why this design was chosen. Awesome, awesome job.