Realignment
If you’re reading this in your favorite RSS aggregator, now might be a good time to visit the site. Stemming from what appeared to be boredom, I took the liberty (and 8 hours) to “realign” around here. The goal with this design was to have a lightweight, minimal and accessible design. I had started to get the feeling that the old design was a slight mixture of ugly and not user friendly. Hopefully this one solves all of those problems or makes them easier to tolerate. I’m still somewhat in the brainstorming phase, so if you have an ideas or feedback let me know.
I have yet to test it in Internet Explorer so please spare me the death threats. When designing this site, or shall I say realigning, several other sites I’ve tagged as minimal and simplistic influenced me: PJ Hyett, Cameron Olthuis, 43Folders, Vague Dream, 37Signals SVN and the Flickr Blog.
Holy crap. This is hotter than Avalonstar. Nice work Paul.
Despite its simplicity, this looks much better than your previous template. Beautiful redesign!
Amazing new look for the site Paul.
Loving it. Crisp and clean. Just my style. ;)
This is so slick. I just love it.
Looks great Paul! I dont know if I would say better than Avalonstar thought. Josue may be smoking something again.
Now you see the images…..now you dont *POOF*
The look is much cleaner
;)
Way better than the previous ugly duckling you had for a template. Your site usually takes/took longer to load for me so I resorted to the RSS feed in any case.
dang this looks good, i saw the picture of it this morning. nice work.
Can you post a before and after shot? Might help in giving a better critique and input. Looking good though, man.
Damn, I forgot to take one. I know I have one around here somewhere..
slightly outdated, but pretty much the same general design for “defiance”
Personally I prefer the site with some color to it. It looks so white now.
Very nice Paul. You know me, I love anything that is simplistic. Just a suggestion … It would be nice if you can add some color (grayish or pinkish) or maybe an outline to your comments, so we can see where the web administrator posts.
Again, it’s very nice and I love the footer. Haha “coded my monkeys”.
I prefer this to your previous design as well. Nicely done Paul.
Looks good. However, your post headline is larger than the name of the site. That seems inverted to me.
That was a quick response! Glad you found an old screenshot. I like where the site is headed . . . a lot more than where Defiance was. But certain elements of your old theme that I think this one could use would perhaps be a more defined sidebar. The contrast between the header of each sidebar area and its content (recent comments, about, etc) is missing in the new design (everything is blue and just looks like it just all ended up there). It all just kind of runs together right now . . . I say continue work on the sidebar and you’re gold.
It’s been fun to watch your site’s design mature and change since I’ve been a reader. Keep it up!
Perhaps a light background on the sidebar, to give it a distinction? What you guys think?
Looks good Paul. A move in the right direction.
Paul - Much slicker than the box design. Very nice.
But the boxy design was always a step backwards from the design before that (2 designs ago). Now that you have moved on again, have you considered releasing your old design(s) as wordpress themes?
I expect there is a lot of clever code in them that others would appreciate using, but not have thee skill to do themselves.
Not sure if you saw, but the older design you speak of was released. As for my last, boxy design if I released it, it probably wouldn’t work for anyone right out of the box. I custom-coded just about everything based around my needs so if I did release it, I would get flooded with support requests. =/ That’s not keeping me from thinking about it though.
This is so beautiful I alsmost want to stop reading you through RSS. Not quite though.
I like white space Paul and the new design is highly usable. But is this not at the cost of your “brand”? It could be any site; infrequent visitors might not recognize it again because there is nothing distinctive to act as a visual hook. This is the third iteration I’ve seen in the months since I’ve been visiting, and while change/ continuing to improve has merits, too much change is not so good. Visit a BBC News page and you instantly know where you are; there are changes from time-to-time but on the whole the site has had “sameness” for as long as I can remember. To me this suggests confidence, consistency, reliability - obviously important messages from such a site. Regular total change suggests a different message altogether… what are you saying each time you wipe the slate and start over?
Hot!
Some similar ideas to what I was working on for my blog, so it means I must be headed in the right direction. Heh.
Nice job, Paul.
This new simplistic touch is great, I like it so much more than the previous design although I also liked the previous one! Nontheless, great job :)
Very Nice Paul. i was Never a fan of the older site. Top stuff ;)
I like the changes that you have made. The site is easy to read, simple to navigate and appears to perform as intended. Just “realigned” my site recently, though I would consider my modifications more than mere realignment.
Anyhow, nice work on the new design. Hope that it works out for you, in the way that you desire.
I do like the look, although a LITTLE color would be nice. I “got out of Tech” in 1991 with the best education in the universe. Everything in life is easier (even having kids) than going through Tech and when I got out, I knew I had done something!
MUCH better than before, but my fav remains to be Deviance. :)
I love it paul, and I got to see it early before you released it. It’s very nice!
Nice “realignment” Paul. I have faught the urge to make my site more visual than it is. I have enjoyed keeping it simple because it doesn’t make me feel the urge to put more into the site than it requires.
One thing that has bothered me about the frontpage for sometime is the Asides. It looks a little odd to come in and see, for instance, the first item indented with all the others not.
Just looks odd to my eye.
@Jeremy: I’ve been struggling to find a way to style the asides so that is something that’s still on my mind.
I have always like the way that Matt Mullenwegg handled his. Kottke does something similar…not giving them a headline or anything.
Nice redesign Paul, though it is very, very spare compared to previous implementations. Nice work though!
You have been slimming down your site for quite a while. Is it just me or this need to keep it as minimal as possible comes from the huge traffic you get every day? (1700 subscribers to your feed is a lot, I’m sure there are many more who come here following links like the RoundCube tutorial and such)
One note, though: it’s a lot easier to read you site if the text has a smaller width (400px for example). But it’s just a thought :)
@Andrei: one of the most important things for me is having a fairly wide article width. many of my articles are lengthy and having a narrow width would make them extremely long and cause massive scrolling in addition to the fact that I couldn’t post nice, wide images.
I like the new design Paul. It reminds me a bit of 5thirtyone, but that is no bad thing. I have to agree with the comment Andrie made, the line length of your posts is too long. The most comfortable reading length for most people is a line of between 7 and 10 words, yours is currently around 14-18. reducing it would make it far easier to read. I also, and this is a personal preference, prefere the asides to be away from the main articles. Maybe reducing your main page line length and adding a column purely for asides next to it would work better, it may also balance the appearance of your blog.
Hopefully you will release your old theme cause i loved it!
Looks great! It would be nice to see a little more color or little things around, but it looks good how it is. Very crisp.
One minor quibble: I’d consider bulleting your Latest Entries and your Delicious list - they tend to wrap due to title length. Even the hover effect is there, for fast readers, some kind of bullet would visually separate the items while maximizing vertical space (not having to put in blank line separators) so we can quickly discern the ending of one title and the beginning of another.
dang this looks good, i saw the picture of it this morning. nice work.