Growing Pains
What you are looking at is not a finished product. Indeed, the design of this site is standards compatible, fairly well structured, and CSS based. Despite this, there are some major flaws. Please allow me to elaborate.
Use of Space
Horizontally, tumbledry v12.2 is a very efficient beast, comfortable fitting all horizontal content into a 800 x 600 monitor space. Vertically, however, it runs into problems. Notice the header. It does an excellent job of establishing the identity of the site, but does so at the cost of some very valuable space. The area where Content would normally live is filled with an empty yellow box as this site loads on a dial-up connection. If I am going to deliver what people come here for (to read), then I will have to reduce the massive billboard header and establish the identity another way. Next, you may have noticed the lists for quotes, links, inspirations (pretty much anything) waste copious amounts of space. This should be remedied by forming a double liquid column that flows down the page. Side by side, the headings will use half as much space and look better to boot. Finally, navigation is currently horizontally oriented and thus limited to a set number of sections. Navigation should be made vertical to stretch and change with the site over time. That brings us to the next point.
All Boxed Up
Newspapers are natural boxes. Their content looks good contained within neat lines and margins. The web is a different medium. The neccesity to box is not nearly as critical due to fundamental differences in the way content is flowed on the page (no webpage is structured to drop the reader off the bottom of one column and then to the top of the next). Unfortunately, tumbledry didn’t get that memo and boxed everything in. The overall effect is stifling, claustrophobic, cramped. The site feels like it is pouring content into concrete forms. Things need to be opened up a bit to let longer pieces of text “breath” and to prevent the reader from feeling like they are viewing everything through a keyhole.
Images
I know. This page is many kb’s too large. I love the background texture, the heading texture, the back-background texture, the special link underline, and the huge logo. In retrospect, however, these pretty images force the user to pay too high a price. They barely scroll on old versions of IE (which renders repeated images very inefficiently), and take their sweet time downloading. Plus, they hog Justin’s bandwidth; something I don’t want to do. A return to a white background (or a very light hue) at first may seem jarring, but I believe strategic doses of smaller images could maintain the site’s organic feel without the current cost of download time. Plus, removing the boxes would make things “feel” more convincing … as if the site wasn’t just special textures hung on the same-old rectangular structure. In short, we need some curves. Currently, I am playing with something similar to an aged cardboard, with rope, and screws. Together, these components seem to create a nice feel, even with the white background. Sounds like I’m talking about a design that already exists, doesn’t it? Well, that’s a secret.
Typography/Readability
There is not enough contrast between the main text and the background. On top of this, the type becomes almost too small to read for people with very large monitors (although it is quite uncommon for a person with a very large monitor to be unaware of how to enlarge their text). On top of this, I would like to strike a nice compromise between serif and sans-serif fonts. This points towards approximately one font designed for screen use that falls between: Trebuchet. Available on both Macs and PC’s, Trebuchet seems to be the solution I have been looking for. It would be slightly larger, and a little more stylish than the plain-Jane Verdana you are reading right now. Headings would become Times New Roman (anti-aliased automatically on newer XP/Mac systems so they are smooth)
Color Scheme
Warm, deep, and even cinnamon have been used to described the colors around here. This is the major factor keeping me from changing things around again. Can I do better that this? What if I make things worse? Am I redesigning simply because I am bored? Those questions will be answered in the next couple of weeks as I try to add some old updates, rewrite some CSS, and recode some ancient PHP slop.
There they are in all their glory, the faults of the current design of this site. Your thoughts concerning a redesign would be greatly appreciated.