About the redesign: Stone cold silver

October 1st, 2008

As some of you have already noticed, this site has changed dramatically this past week. Not only is this the first “dark” design for this website, but a couple things have been added and taken away from the site structure and content itself, namely:

The sidebar

In the interest of having a design that is simple and cleaner looking, I’ve scraped all the extras a sidebar usually has: latest twitter post, categories, recent posts, etc. In it’s place is a clean, slightly more modern looking descriptive navigation. Also for the first time, the navigation side by side to the content, as opposed to above.

Lifecasting

This is an entirely new feature that has been in the works for a month or two now, only cleverly hidden behind the title of my tumblr. I’ve now integrated it into the rest of the site, giving it the same look and feel, as well as navigation, so can flip between this and the rest of the site seamlessly. My twitter updates are also streamed into here, as text posts. The lifecasting stream has its own RSS feed separate to this blog, and you can subscribe to that here.

The purpose of lifecasting is to record some of the more personal details of my life: what I wore, where I am, what I’m doing, who I’m with, etc. With the arrival of my new [i]phone, I’m often updating on the go and away from the computer, so these updates, entries and photos found in the lifecasting stream are more “raw” and less thought out and carefully posted, as opposed to the content in this blog.

The alignment

As another dimension to this new redesign, I wanted change up many of the different elements that have stuck with my past designs since the conception of this site. Another first for the website is left side alignment, which is what I’ve featured in this design.

The header (or lack thereof)

One of the focuses of this redesign was to bring the content out more, and one of the ways to achieve that was to remove other distractions. I think I struck a balance between appearance and function with the logo square, but apart from that, I’ve left out any images that would distract or “push down” (as would be the case in a horizontally-stacked layout) the content.

The Archives

Since the sidebar extras were scraped, the archives make up for the lost links. Here you can search for something, click for a random post or browse by category, year or month. This is probably my favorite page on the entire site right now.

One last note about the colors and theme

Some of you may remember a trial design that went up before my previous pink and grey layout. It had a more modern feel to it, and featured the colors white, pink, dark gray and a teal “windows 95″ color. That trial layout didn’t go so well (hence the reason it never stuck around long term) and had some unfortunate design flaws in it (namely, too much whitespace), but this design borrows many of its more modern features from that layout. Hopefully better integrated, though!

Any thoughts?

10 Responses to “About the redesign: Stone cold silver”

chris dropped by to say:

Hi Chanel,

Thank you for visiting my site…While I’ve never seen your previous theme, I do like this one because it’s different from a lot of themes out there.

Reply: Thanks Chris!
October 1st, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Lucy dropped by to say:

I love the integration of tumblr with the rest of your site and the simplicity of your side bar. Great job! :)
October 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Meli dropped by to say:

HOLY HELL, Chanel, I want to eat this layout up. Seriously, I’m in love with it. I’m a huge huge fan of that “background” noise look; I have to ban myself from that filter in Photoshop or I’ll use it in every design. I think the thing that makes this particular layout full of win is whatever font it is you’re using for your headers. *peers at css* Orator STD? That’s not a standard font, is it? No, but it’s beautimous.

And lifecast, I love it. I was thinking of doing that same kind of thing (ever since I got my new phone that has a camera worth bothering with, blackberry ftw), and have a twitter account to prove it, but I never could come up with a good name for it. Lifecast is neat.

Kudos!
October 1st, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Vered - MomGrind dropped by to say:

It’s beautiful. I’ve been trying to declutter my sidebar too, but it’s not nearly as clean as yours. I love it!
October 1st, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Belinda dropped by to say:

Oooh I like your new layout!! I feel it’s actually more intimate than your previous ones, even if it might be more “simple”. And I love your archives too. BTW, did you do your archives with the aid of a plugin or is it manually generated? I constantly have trouble displaying my archives properly, I’d love to find a plugin that actually works.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Tracey dropped by to say:

One word: Genius. It’s amazingly amazing and I don’t even say that lightly.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:14 am
Rachael dropped by to say:

I have good news and bad news.

Good news - The colours are lovely.

Bad news - The layout completely breaks in both google chrome and IE6. :|
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:52 am
Amanda dropped by to say:

Oh wow, it’s so different to anything else around at the moment!
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:12 am
Erin dropped by to say:

I think it’s very pretty and swishy. Congrats!
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:40 am
Daddy Dan dropped by to say:

I like it, very clean looking. I like your new lifecasting section too!
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:15 pm

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