Sunday, September 27, 2009

Template Concept for New Blog

This template combines elements of the logo with another image and a semi-custom Wordpress theme. Feel free to share your feedback in the comments.

11 comments:

Smoked Peach Glaze said...

Dude! Who speaks latin?

Bill Gates said...

steam catapult = jet engine?


what am I missing?

JK said...

Whoah, way to get the readers of the blog in trouble at work, SPG, thanks a lot.

And FTR, Latin is a very cool (but hard) language to learn. You should give it a try.

DaveinHackensack said...

That Latin text is commonly used as filler by web developers, but in their book "Getting Real" the folks at 37 Signals make a good argument against the use of it. Some aspects of layout (such as readability) you don't fully catch if the text is in a language you can't read.

Vladimir Vukicevic said...

Generally I like it - it's neat and clean.

It does look very corporate-y - i.e. GE meets Boeing. I'm not sure if that's what you were shooting for. So it ends up feeling like large-scale innovation as opposed to VC/startup-type innovation. Maybe adding one more color to the palette would help.

I like the logo.

DaveinHackensack said...

Interesting point about the GE/Boeing allusion. I hadn't thought of that originally, but I see it now.

ShanaC said...

I agree with Vlad about it being very corporatey. This is neither good nor bad. Just a state of being. If that is he purpose of the blog, so let it be. Without clear specs ????
(By section from here on out as I catch things that my eyes sees)

I think the whitespace is a little off. Your second headline looks as if it has too much padding on the left because of the position of the jet engine. Either move the jet engine a few pixels to the right, change the angle of the jet engine slightly so that it points slightly to the right (I think) bring your eye away from the fact that the space between it and the words are way too narrow, or do something to make it look narrower, and moving away from its postion. Or move it. I still think that position is way too much the focus of the page. You want your words to be the focus of this page by the looks of this design, not the big honkin' jet engine.

You have legibility issues in the top headline. White is not enough of a contrast with the shade of gray in your navigation bar (home, about, etc). It's hard to read as a result. Change that. We're nice to people who wear trifocals and do computer stuff. Eyestrain is bad.

Move the entire block of web to the right a smidge, it's justified left, when it should be justified center. There is a lot more blue-grey on the right. This always annoys me, even on my own blog. It's a pet peeve. I just haven't gotten around to hacking it on my own blog, yet I wish I could force everyone else to mind their whitespace. It's an easy way to get the page to look balanced, without investing in fancy pictures or whatnot. (I am teaching myself the css to get away with a change, already I changed the quotes, I dislike what I have still, I jsut want to slowly do it myself...grrrr)

Also, this is purely a directional thing- why do you choose the blog as a short highlight, and the comments as a short highlight, against a long body of text? What are the plans for all of these blocks? I have strong mixed feelings because I'm not the designer and I already know you write prolifically. I'm not sure why your hiding the main block of updated writing into a tiny box, rather than the big one. This is a very clear design choice about the focus of the page. It's not on the blog. Same idea of why are the comments featured?

You may also want to drop the "Launching Innovation" part of the logo. The reason is you would have more options in the CSS for fonts if you did not have that as part of the image, and instead coded that in. It could then match (or slightly mismatch) the body text, which now no longer has to be an arial like font. The new-new thing from what I've heard is to try CSS2 rules about embedding fonts, so you could try something like Bookman, or Liberation.

(I have a slightly biased preference for serif fonts- as monitors get bigger, older font "rules" will start applying more. For larger blocks of text, the easiest on the eye at 10 pt is usually a serif. The reason people don't like it is that older monitors did not rend the serifs of serifs well originally. New monitors do a much better job. If you think your fonts will be above 10 pts and are also going to be read by the reading glasses crowd, switch to a serif font that's meant for reading long blocks of texts.)

(PS. if you find my twitter icon, tell me what you think. It's an alpha of a log. I'm not in love. It's doesn't look enough like me while also being too detailed/not enough?)

DaveinHackensack said...

Thanks for the feedback, Shana. Some of it is above my head, but I will definitely pass it along to my designers.

Re your Twitter icon, where would I find that? Your world frightens and confuses me. Can you post a link to it here?

DaveinHackensack said...

Incidentally, the dummy post includes the domain name of the first subscription-based site my company is launching and that site's logo (which was designed by the same firm).

ShanaC said...

Twitter did something to it, but you can see it on my page. (I have two different versions, a jpg and an svg, along with the .ai on my laptop's, Ezzie, hardrive)

This is my profile page

I realize I feel sort of weird giving that long message. Tell your designer it's meant in friendly critique mode. The design is overall very good, and I'm being nit-picky, because I search out this kind of stuff for my Bachelors and for fun. I'm using a lot of art/design critique words that I'm picking up along the way, so don't worry if the discussion seem a bit technical

DaveinHackensack said...

I asked my designers to take a look at your comment. Haven't heard back from them yet, but hopefully they'll see your second comment too.

Re your profile page, Twitter did the shading on one side? It sort of makes it look like you've got a black eye, but maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Interesting though. Sort of like Fred going with the drawing of your face.