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Old Fashioned

As a designer, redesigning your very own site is harder than what one might expect. Or want. Furthermore, how do you realign a four year old weblog with more than 1300 entries and 50 categories? The answer is: treating yourself as a client.

In this case, the client noticed that his blogging activity was decreasing due to an overdose of work. He wanted to encourage his writing by not limiting himself to full length posts, but instead offering, small, quick to share, links, quotes, images and musical reviews.

The design was also important for the client. He wanted a clean, jaw-dropping site, powered by a strong typographic grid, inspired in the Swiss Style of Design.

Everything should be waving around zero dollars, of course.

The truth is that this project started as an exercise for dealing with grids and typography. The very first idea was to release a ready-to-use Wordpress theme inspired in the International Typographic Style.

With the coming days I quickly noticed that I couldn’t easily release this project; basically due to the custom features added to Wordpress. All the visuals were requiring a custom category and page structure that isn’t just shared by most users or default installations.

Powering the design, there’s a hand-made elastic (EM based), 12 column grid. The elastic layout guarantees that the design won’t break when user changes the text size. When designing this project I developed two modular grids, each one of 12 columns, but targeted to two different resolutions: 900 pixels (for resolutions greater than 1024×768px) and 780 pixels (for resolutions lower than 1024×768px). These custom grid frameworks are now powering other projects too, including QuoteUp.

Two fonts were used. Helvetica (Arial in PC) and Palatino (Georgia in PC). Ampersands and by-lines were spruced up with Palatino/Georgia, following the well known typographic style conventions.

The result is a clean site, with plenty of white space and type treatment that honors content. Client satisfied.

Finally, it’s good to mention that this was my first attempt to embrace the Golden Rectangle principle. It is said that artists proportioned their works to approximate the form of the golden rectangle, which has been considered aesthetically pleasing.

This design was featured in Smashing Magazine, Vandelay Website Design, Design By Grid, CSS Gallery and others.