And Now for Something Completely Different
I've been playing around with some modest changes to the blog appearance, and have developed a new stylesheet, that I think is much cleaner than the one we are currently using.
If you'd like to take a gander at it, it's available for review here. Let me know what you think. I'll be developing other stylesheets, as time/drive allows, and I'll announce the release of those, too.
That is all.
P.S.: There are a few options and features I've disabled because they query JavaScript from Blogger's servers. Rest assured that these features will be present in any layout changes that are implemented. (i.e.: the toolbar at the top of the page, the "email post" icon, etc.)
posted by gcolbath @ 12:42 PM
5 Comments:
I've made some changes based on this feedback. I'm going for a "function over form" kind of thing, right now. Also, I want to reiterate that this is only a potential direction for layout and appearance.
I can do vastly different things with this, given the time and drive to do so. I just thought we could throw something a little more subdued up for a little while, until a more desireable design has been selected.
I'm wrapping up my master degree in the next few weeks, so after that I ought to have some time to devote to coming up with more colorful ideas.
Give it a little flava (by which I mean color) and I'm down.
Thanks for putting in the work. Like they said, more color'd be good.
And is there any way we can have our greatest hits appear somewhere on the side? Handy little links to our top 5 or so conversations would be great for any newbies passing thru, I think.
I must say I liked the white, clean look. I am not such a fan of the gradients in the post boxes, however. So long as we have some sort of modest title graphic (could just be stylized/colored text of "The Optimates"), I think a clean white, or very light color would be best. Our blog emphasizes the writen content, so we don't want it to be too distracting. Black text on a white background is easiest on the eyes and also makes what colors we do have stand out better.
The left alignment is good (insert political alignment pun here), but I wonder if more room couldn't be spared for the main post column? I know there is a certain max width you aim for to accomodate foolish people with low screen resolutions (how do they LIVE with themselves?), but more space might be nice.
Well, yes, I was trying for a very simplistic design because the focus should be on our content, and not how the blog looks. I mean, I don't want it to be drab... but I wanted to go with something professional, yet somewhat dynamic, without being fruit salad.
Also, on top of screen resolution, there is a legibility issuse that designers need to take into account. Some of the factors in legibility are line length and line height ("leading," or the space between lines of text). More information is available here. They say that the width of a text block should only be 365px, and I think the new design is using 500px, minus some padding, for the width of the main content.
We don't just want this thing to have intellectual content, and look professional, we also want it to be easy to access for our readers.
That is to say, of course, that I'm not ruling out color entirely. I still would like to try other ideas.
I also like the idea of a top 5. I'll look into how to implement that. I'm not sure if that's a regular feature of Blogger, or if it's a "hack," a la the Recent Comments Sidebar.
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