I know I promised the ether that I’d publish a Noscope redesign today. And here it is; white squares on what is currently a grayish background in a fixed-width single column left-aligned design.
One day I woke up and felt like shedding my old clothes1. Since I make my living doing websites, cleverer people than me might have advised that I do that years ago. I’d tell them that redesigns are essentially bad, and should only be done if you have really good reasons to do so. Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of reason for quite a while.
At one point I had a love-affair with liquid-width designs—you know, designs where if you scale your browser window, the contents stretch to fit? As it turns out, we were starcrossed lovers. This, in part due to James apt observations that the appearance of fullpage zoom spells the death of said mistress. I happen to agree.
Fullpage zoom is only available in modern browsers—nearly all browsers built after the year 2001, or in humanspeak: not IE6. That means users of said browser aren’t welcome here any more. That includes potential clients for my webdesign business; yep, I’m that serious. I won’t build your crap anymore! Shoo! Go back to your Ford T and speak of how the old days were better. All those are met with an unwelcome message.
I’m a fan of both simple, changing and not changing designs. Those are three core values that are fairly hard to wed. My attempt at doing so spells square shapes, no cut corners, a single column (another bandwagon I’m late to join) and changing backgrounds. Right now I’m really satisfied with the current Apophysis generated fractal flame gracing the underbelly of this vehicle of text, but it’ll change. From time to time. That and colors.
In fact, at one point I wanted every color to be so customizable that I tried to concoct deadly mechanisms to achieve my goals. The idea was to upload vectorized SVG icons, and colorize and convert them to PNGs on the fly, serving iconography fitted to the time of day, my mood, heck, even your mood. No such luck, this time around.
I also ditched the tabs;
Before:
After:
Today, well, even back when I added the tabs in the first place, tabs indicate instant effect. This being an HTML powered website (the best type of powered website), the effects were never instant. So no more tabs, except on the frontpage, where the effect is instant. I knew this all along, but I told myself that I wanted to unite the various sections and bring focus to other content than just this journal. I have no such illusions any more, now I just want you to look once at my contact page, because I think it looks really nice.
- By the way, I’ve gathered a little wardrobe of discarded clothes, you can see all the previous no-designs there ↑
