Freshening up

You may notice something different around here today. Unless of course you are reading this in RSS, and if that’s the case, good on ya’, RSS 4 evah! I decided recently to do some design around here, change things up with a new look. This an iteration, some things haven’t really changed, while others have quite a bit.

A few weeks ago as I was trying to fall asleep I got an idea for a redesign of this site. And I got excited about it. I promptly fell asleep and then woke up and was still excited. One of the reasons for my excitement was to leave floats behind and use a combination of flexbox and CSS Grid for layout. The other was the idea of being able to put my own art on the site.

The goal of this redesign became about putting more of me, the non-technical, non webbish me, in the design. I’m achieving that through some of the words, but moreso through the color choices and the art. Most of the people who know me through the web don’t know that I studied art in college and, more specifically, I have a BFA in drawing and painting, in which I focused on color theory. My senior work was all about complements and working within the constraints of those colors.

Fast forward to today and I still love one complimentary set the most, blue and orange. It’s on this site as a harkening back to my earliest days making, where that combination was an obsession. It felt time for a reappearance in my life.

In addition to a bit of a throwback to my earlier days via color, I wanted to highlight the way in which I’ve shifted how I spend much of my time over the past few years. I left art behind not long after art school and didn’t do any making for a lot of years, until late 2015 when I began again. And now I draw every day.

I’m excited to show recent artwork on the top level pages, these may change occasionally, we’ll see how much I feel like doing that as I continue to create. As for the other changes, I wanted to use more screen space, so the layout is doing that, especially on my photos main page. And I felt like a change of type, so I’m now using Mr. Eaves and Mrs. Eaves. I wasn’t too sure about them at first, but they’ve grown on me as I’ve worked with them to finalize all the various type styles.

The final piece that I’m rather proud of with this redesign is that I learned a new skill to use going forward with my artwork. I scanned my drawn initials and made them into an SVG for the logo. A bit more of me in the mix and it’s feeling good.

The only issue I know of right now is that MS Edge doesn’t support object-position and I’m using it, along with CSS Grid (which MS Edge also doesn’t support) on my photos main page. I’m still not sure how to fall back for the object-position but I’ll be thinking on that. I took care of the layout in Edge by doing a simple float layout using @supports not and hopefully I’ll be able to delete that code soon. Come on Edge!

The rest of the base of my site stayed the same; this is still a Jekyll site, it’s still pretty basic at it’s core, and I’m still using Typekit for the fonts. I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak things, I always feel woefully inadequate as a designer but also feel the need to own everything about my site, so I plod along and attempt to design.