I'm a Christian, a designer, and a gadget fan who lives in Cheltenham, UK.

This is my blog, a creative outlet to mess around and play with as well as a place that logs my thoughts and inspirations.

Tag: responsive

Site Updates

Any­one would think I’m a bit of a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment. Most peo­ple spend their week­ends relax­ing, I seem to spend mine think­ing about work, my blog and side projects that I want to start. This week­end I final­ly fin­ished one of those lit­tle side projects which I’ve worked on in my spare time. A lit­tle update to the design of this site to replace the last ver­sion which was only ever intend­ed as a bit of a stop gap, even though it was up for the best part of a year.
The design will be famil­iar to most of you, who’ve been before. It’s large­ly an update to the typog­ra­phy of the site, which now uses Adelle Sans for the head­lines and Adelle for the body copy. I’ve also final­ly added a prop­er about page, archives page and a site search which were lack­ing from the pre­vi­ous version.
Part of the desire to update the look of the site came from me want­i­ng to be able to share more orig­i­nal con­tent. I want­ed to be able to post some pho­tos, and use that as a spring board to begin using my cam­era more regularly.
I also took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn how to imple­ment some of the respon­sive design tech­niques I’ve been read­ing about and to see how it worked with images. I’m pret­ty pleased with the result and the read­ing expe­ri­ence on the iPhone and iPad.
There may be a few lit­tle tweaks here and there over the next cou­ple of weeks, when is a bog own­er nev­er tweak­ing the design of the site? But for now, I’m pret­ty hap­py with it.

The Web Aesthetic ›

To put it anoth­er way, we’re embrac­ing “respon­sive” but neglect­ing the sec­ond part: “design.” We’re replac­ing fixed-width divs with flu­id ones. As we under­go a peri­od of reassess­ment, both of our prac­tice and of our tools, now is the right time to seek out an aes­thet­ic that is truer to the medium.

I, like many, love the notion behind respon­sive web design but one thing I’ve noticed is that more often than not sites start to look the same. With a lit­tle more, well maybe a lot more, con­sid­er­a­tion we can start to pro­duce designs that are appro­pri­ate to their medi­um (aka screen/bandwidth avail­able) rather than just shrink­ing or col­laps­ing sec­tions of a web page.