SONY DSC

Haiku

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All I want to be
Is someone that makes new things
And thinks about them
–John Maeda

When it comes to designing my website, I always end up creating a bunch of ideas that eventually get thrown out of the window. They mostly seem great in my head, then after a few days I start to hate them, or a friend points out just how bad my approach has been. I’m grateful for that — it keeps me on my toes.

More recently, I was restricting my usual process to the rules I’d read in books — design theory I’d picked up and thrown together in a somewhat hopeless attempt to grasp some kind of real design education (most of the things I’ve learnt at University are more code-oriented than design theory.) I was choking my creativity on meticulously engineered grid systems and painstakingly maintained vertical rhythm.

Then one day I turned to my work in progress and threw it out. I started again, dismissing all logic I might have otherwise used to dictate my decisions, and just went with my gut. For the whole thing. You’re looking at the results. There isn’t really much else to say about the redesign — there’s a rough baseline of 30px at its full width, it’s responsive, and I wanted huge, inflated text, musical recommendations on posts, and big cover images for those ‘special’ articles and pages.

The content has been stripped back for now, while I fit it all to the new design. I know I should probably have done that before I made the switch, but we all know how impatient I can be.

Now I can finally get back to work.

  • http://nath.is/ Nathaniel Higgins

    This is nice dude! I don’t see ANYTHING that I don’t like.

  • http://www.lukejones.me/ Luke Jones

    Dan, you’re so talented. I’ve never known anyone who’s had such a steep learning curve and has put so much effort into getting better and better at what they do. This new design demonstrates the amount of thought you put into the little details and I love it. I am so jealous of you.

    The one thing I’d say could use work is the meta bit at the end of your post. The process should be that the user has their music recommendation, the number of comments and the date/time it was posted before they read it – not after.

    • http://daneden.me Dan Eden

      Thanks man. That means an awful lot from someone I’ve long admired :)

      Thanks for your thoughts on the meta stuff, too. But really, I wanted to make the reading experience closer to that of a book with this design — huge margins etc. I nearly completely omitted the meta information. But putting at the end makes it feel like ‘closing thoughts’. That’s how I see it, anyway.

    • http://www.lukejones.me/ Luke Jones

      Thanks to you too – it’s lovely to be admired, even though I don’t deserve any admiration!

      Understandable about the meta stuff and you’ve definitely achieved the style you’re looking for. It’s your site, you can do what you wish with it! :)