moai, (plural moai): one of the large stone heads on Easter Island (Rapa Nui)

I know, my redesigns used to have a pseudo-profound reasoning. This one doesn’t, I assure you. I simply find moai exceedingly fascinating. That’s why this entire redesigned layout you’re now looking at (provided you’ve stepped out of your feedreader) is dedicated to the awesomeness seeping from every crevasse of Easter Island. Which unfortunately I haven’t been to, but plan to visit. At some point.

This project took a while. Months of on/off work, in fact, and far more design-iterations than I had originally planned. Mostly because getting moai to look good in a webdesign turned out to be a challenge; one I’ve now documented in animated GIF files here because GIFs speak louder than words:

There’s even a GIF of the entire header area, too large to fit here.

There’s also new cool stuff:

• Because I’ve found Twitter (follow me!) to be endlessly fascinating, not only are “Tweetbacks” added as comments (see my V post for examples) but on single posts you can now click “tweet this” in the same passive-aggressive manner that all the young hipsters do.
• There’s a new logo.
• Work and play is now completely separate, this blog being “play”. Except of course, for the huge blue sticker advertising my work site.
• I started work on my own font, (mostly because I can, now that the cool browser can embed fonts for real), but ended up using the beautiful(ler) BPreplay by George Triantafyllakos. I’ve even exploded the size of the headings now that I can use such a pretty font.
• In the course of my rather WordPress centric freelance adventure, I’ve built quite a few open-source WordPress things. That’s why there’s now a dedicated section, right next to Skyler the silent moai.
• You’ll also no doubt (which is the point) notice the links to recent stuff tagged ‘something’ right at the top of the page. That’s a custom-made widget which grabs most recently updated posts.

I also scrapped a few things:

• Comments are now off by default (more on that later).
• I ditched my poster section, but it’ll probably reappear later in some form.
• There’s no longer a CSS style switcher (and it’s not coming back). This is the design, and it’s staying for a while.

That’s it. Let there be rock.