greg-wood.co.uk

Unfortunately, as a result, it isn’t entirely finished. There are a number of bits and bobs floating around that I need to attend to, although hopefully the fact that the site is live will make me sort them out sooner.

Why a realign?

Reading Cameron Moll’s article and subsequent slides back some time last year forced me to look at my own personal site in a different way. What was the point of it? What was it trying to achieve? When the answers to those questions were ‘every web designer needs a site of their own’ and ‘fuck knows’, I decided to give it a realign.

Something I’m passionate about, both on and off the web, is reading. On the web, all my favourite sites offer good content for me to read on a regular basis. By good content I mean articles. I love reading well written articles about websites. Designers like Andy Clarke, Simon Collison, Khoi Vinh and Jason Santa Maria as well as sites like Think Vitamin and Digital Web provide me with that content. Well I decided that I want to write more articles. I’m sure I’ve got enough to talk about, (my mates will tell you how I bore them to death every Friday in the pub) so this site has been realigned with article writing in mind.

Also, I needed to display my work more effectively. I thought a good way to do this was to accompany each piece with an article about how and why it was designed. So yeah, more articles.

The Design of the Realign

Because the site is so article based, I ended up taking inspiration almost entirely from the Sunday Observer newspaper. In my opinion the Observer is a beautifully designed paper, and as a result presents its content very nicely. You may see that this site looks almost nothing like the paper although various aspects are similar.

I love the use of colour throughout the Observer. Often using dark, muted shades of green, blue and red, the colour is used sparingly only to highlight things of interest. The layout of the paper is rather different to this two-column based website, but I’ve used colour in the same way. Incidentally, the red and the blue you see on this site ended up being fairly similar to the shades used in the newspaper, although these actually developed from months of photoshopping around. I only noticed the similarities when I bought the Observer for the first time in quite a while last Sunday!

The layout was probably the most difficult part to decide upon during the design stages. I didn’t want to enclose the content, nor did I want to leave it floating out into the whitespace. In the end, a grid-based layout let me place content in the sea of white without it looking detached from the rest of the site. The grid measurements ended up turning to ems during the XHTML stage, but the proportions remain the same when you resize your text, for example.

The Future

I think I will get round to writing more about various elements of the design and making of the site in more detail (including my new-found, undying love for the Expression Engine), but for now that rounds things off nicely. Thanks to Stu and Simon for their advice all those months ago, unfortunately your helpful comments got lost in the transition from Wordpress to EE. Also if anyone spots anything untoward, be nice and drop me an email.