I realized last night that it has been almost a year since my last redesign of the site. Well, ok, nine months, but that’s a long time for me. I also realized that I have about a week until the first day of spring, and I haven’t come up with any spring skin for the site yet, either. Total redesign, or spring theme? What to do, what to do? Maybe both…

Update: Well, we fixed that little problem, now didn’t we? Believe it or not, this is just a spring theme, despite the fact that the site looks remarkably different. So, in summary, Version 8.0, No. Version 7.3, Yes. Spring has sprung indeed. Happy Easter!

I don’t know if this will be the final design for the ‘Save the Date’ cards, but I had a lot of fun putting it together, so I thought I’d share.

When I launched the site’s redesign a few weeks ago, it was only partially complete. It was materially enough complete to publish, and I was excited about getting it up and running as quickly as I could. There are, though, small little tweaks, fixes, enhancements, additions and subtractions, outside of the basic additions of posts, or updating outbound links. As an example, you can see the Frequently Asked Questions page. I wanted to update the look of the past editions of this site, to give more information, and to give it a cleaner look than was employed previously. As another example, though, read the answers to many of the questions related to my content management through Wordpress. They’re don’t make a lick of sense within my current site architecture, and need to be updated. So it’s little things like that that I spend my time on, when I do have a fleeting moment or two to devote to the site, often at the detriment of actual posts. It’s just as important, though, at least to me, as the posts, and so I do those things so that the site can be considered complete in my own eyes. It’s a labor of love, I know.

With that in mind, 0ne of the pages sorely in need of attention is the about page. It has served it’s purpose in the past, for sure, but I really wanted to add to it, to sort of revitalize it along with the rest of the site. To help accomplish this, I e-mailed The Mom about three weeks ago. I wanted to know if she had any older childhood pictures of me in digital format, because I wanted to add a few to the site. Of course, she didn’t. I asked as politely as possible for a favor, the 1,743,597th favor that I’ve asked my mother for since I was born, to be exact, and within a few weeks, after I’d forgotten, actually, I received the gift of twenty-something pictures from all steps of my childhood journey through this world. The pictures brought back memory after memory, but, as anyone from my generation knows when looking at pictures of themselves as a child, it was hard to distinguish, when viewing, if the coloring in the photos were due to aging, or the god awful outfits we were forced to wear as children of the seventies.

After downloading all of the photos, I spent my lunch break at work doing some color correction on the photos in Photoshop, and was amazed at the results. I use Photoshop CS2, and am generally a huge fan of all things Adobe, anyways, but the ease of which I was able to bring life back to the past surprised even me, and the results are obvious, as you can surely see:

The pictures seemed to jump off the screen, to the point that I actually began to think about the implications of such a process. Imagine a world in which history doesn’t fade; where the photo of your great, great grandparents, passed down through the years, can be saved, possibly forever, for future generations. Or where your parents wedding photographs can be displayed at their 50th wedding anniversary, as if they were taken yesterday. Of course, the beauty of originality can’t be overstated, but the safety of a digital alternative, brought to a world in which wear and tear is inevitable, can bring an assurance to those important event that we want to be remembered. Or even those moments where our mothers put us in frilly jumpsuits and gave us girlish hair cuts.

Such moments may not go down as legendary in the annals of history; maybe not even my own personal history, but they serve my purpose now. The update of the about page should be done shortly, and I’ve got a brand new set of pictures, which I’ve decided to share on Flickr for all to see. Some, I like, but they’re all there, even the ones that I’m less than proud of. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be around for a while.

Well, this is it.

I’d like to say that this is what the site will look like for quite a while, but honestly, everyone who reads my site consistently knows that I can’t make this promise. But I do feel very good about this incarnation of the site, for a few reasons. And as always, I want to explain the thoughts behind the decisions that I made regarding this new design, and why I’ve tried to go in the direction that I have. Believe it or not, I do understand that these posts, where I explain the thoughts and processes that each new design goes through, probably aren’t for everyone. They are, however, important to me, if only for archival purpose, and so I choose to put this to pixel now in the hopes that either someone, anyone, gains some insight into my thought process, or, more likely, that I read this and laugh a few years down the road.

I liked a lot of aspects of the previous design of the site, but it was those aspects of the design that I never became completely comfortable with that caused me to want to redesign again. The archival organization of the old site was poor, and it never quite fit in with the design of the rest of the site, a fact that irked me to no end. I was also never quite comfortable with the placement of the most recent post on the front page, and could never quite come to a solution to the issue, because I was very pleased with the placement of the secondary elements near the top of the page. The most important elements of this site, in my eyes, are the words that I write to express my thoughts, and my life, to those that aren’t able to share it on a consistent basis, and the images of the photographs I take, for the same reasons. Everything else is just filler. Just fluff. Granted, it does give more insight into me, my personality, those things that i might find interest in, but it can’t relay any more about me than what those that know me are already aware of. So I wanted to strip away the clutter, and put the focus back on what was important. I wanted something fresh, something clean. Something beautifully simple. So I began like I always do, scouring the Internet for inspiration, and focusing on the structural form of the page, and a header to give it the singular flash of color that I was looking for.

“I wanted something fresh, something clean. Something beautifully simple.”

Inspiration comes from many sources, some obvious, some slightly less so. The right inspiration can bring about something almost magical it hits the right person. The wrong inspiration can bring about a mess; easily forgotten. My original inspiration came while randomly surfing the Internet for some information on one of my favorite musical groups, Govt Mule. I stumbled upon the Bonnaroo ‘07 site, and was immediately struck by the design of the logo. I thought that I had the inspiration that I needed, and so I went to work on a banner for the site, and eventually came up with something that I was initially pleased with. When trying to integrate the header into the structural form of what I wanted for the site, though, it just didn’t work, and I couldn’t put together anything that pleased me, so I went back to the drawing board. Well, mostly, I just stalled, and surfed the web.

I eventually got it right though. I believe I was reading Authentic Boredom when I finally clicked the right link. Cameron Moll’s links to interesting articles, pictures, and other minutiae around the web are something that I check on a pretty consistent basis, and usually provide links to inspiration worthy content, and this time was no exception. I had visited Design Observer a few times in the past, but it wasn’t a regular in my surfing rotation. I was immediately inspired, and began molding my ideas into a form that was an amalgam of the the new inspirational site, and the original header image.

And that’s what you see at the top of the site. As I said before I wanted to keep things beautifully simple, and I tried to focus on that as I continued on with the design (I have a tendency to over-design, for lack of a better word, and in case you haven’t noticed). Basic white was an easy choice for me as the background color, and I decided upon a monochromatic collection of muted blues and grays as a color element. I wanted a sans-serif font, in order to keep with the clean lines of the site, and I ended up deciding upon the Gill Sans font family, with the always sturdy Helvetica as a backup. Finally, I decided upon the Silk icon set for the sidebar elements because of their simple design, and…aw, who am I kidding, there’s a ton of them, they’re easy to use, and most importantly, they’re free.

I made some improvements to how I managed the site, but I spoke about those when describing The Girl’s redesign, so I won’t get into them much at all here. In summary, the changes that I’ve made should allow me to spend more time adding content to the site, and less time tweaking the design, or writing code for some function that I can now perform through Wordpress. But I suppose we’ll have to see how that works out. As they say, idle hands are the devil’s tools…

I’ve just spent the last few hours trying to re-organize my Flickr account photos, uploading some photos that have are long overdue to be shared, and even some pictures that I’ve just taken, like the following, from Mississippi on the Mall this past weekend:

For those of you that have been missing the pictures since I changed the layout on the page, check out all of the new additions at My Photos Page on Flickr. And don’t fret, the newest redesign is almost complete, and, as always, my pictures will play a pretty central role in the design.