The Return of the Black
I did something tonight that I have never done before. I thought about changing my site back to the black design and just went ahead and did it. I didn’t second guess myself, I didn’t try and work it into my schedule. I dropped what I was doing and sat here for a solid 7 hour stretch and just fuckin’ did it. So, why the change?
There have always been things about my site that I wasn’t happy with. I’ve built it out so much over the past year and a lot of it felt (and looked) tacked on. Every time I open my stylesheet I cringe at the sight of some old habits I’ve since broke and always wanted to go back and rewrite it. But really, who’s gonna do that? Not this guy! I a lot of changes that brought my CSS up to a state that I can at least live with until I do a full redesign. I changed all my font units from percentage to em. I never really knew the full advantages of em over the other units until I read “Effective Style with em” over at MondayByNoon. A great read if you’re not fully in the know on that topic. I also removed pixel units from everything with a value of zero – another bad habit of mine. And lastly, I revised all my colours and shortened those that duplicate to 3 characters. It’s funny how long it’s taken me to change my ways. Every CSS or Web Standards book I’ve read has always shown the proper way of doing things, but I never bothered to change. Old habits die hard, I suppose.
I decided to bring back the coloured headings, which meant ditching the link colours and going back to a coloured underline for the various sections. In turn, I ended up going back to the “highlighting” effect that drew so much attention way back when. And speaking of colour, I’ve introduced a fourth into the mix. School bus yellow – yeah! Ugh, I’m so not a fan of yellow, to be honest. But it works, so I’ll keep it. I wanted to separate my work related stuff from personal on the site as I have in every other aspect of my life. So yellow it is for the Design section.
Lastly, I simplified the header quite a bit and tamed it down. I was never fully happy with it and I’m still not, but it’s an improvement. At least it doesn’t stand out as much as the previous one. I was always bothered by the alignment of the header on subpages as well. Originally, everything was peachy. Then I decided to stretch the sidebar out to 300px to fit some ads in there and it threw everything off. I’ve fixed this now, so all subpages line up now. While you’re looking in that direction, you may have noticed that my name is nowhere to be found. Yes, this is on purpose. I couldn’t settle on a typeface I really liked and I didn’t have time to work on a “logo”, so I pulled it off all together. I’m not sure I really need a logo for my myself, anyway. I might come back to this, but will most likely leave it as is until the next redesign.
I have lots more I will be doing over the next week or so. Finally ran out of hours today and I’m a little tired, to say the least. So i’ll get to them when I can. To those that preferred the black design over the white and pink, sorry it took so long to bring it back (in some form) – hope you like it! The white really wasn’t me anyway. I love black. I wear a black shirt every day (seriously), all the furniture in my home is black and I painted my damn Xbox 360 black. My website needs to be black.