Rui CarmoSo yes, like I was mulling a few days ago, I’ve decided to dish out a very flat, monochrome and lean site design during this vacation, guaranteed to infuriate those who visit the site with anything but Safari for the coming days (hang tight, I’m still tinkering) and heavily influenced by Shaun Inman and Khoi Vinh, but with my own little twists.
Since by some reason the vast minority of people who have wide screens kept complaining about the site’s narrow columns, I’m trying out something called Faux absolute positioning in an attempt to provide some liquidity to the layout.
It will now stretch horizontally, but (like I keep telling those people) at the expense of readability. I’ll be tweaking the typography and margins over the next few days to try to sort that out.
If I don’t succeed, well, then I’ll just do a standard grid (most of the elements are already prepared for it, as you may have noticed).
I also did away with the fixed-width photo header (and the Flash associated with it), much to my chagrin (for I dearly loved some of those photos). A replacement of sorts is in the works, but I have no idea when it will surface.
Next up, I will be tweaking the navigation a little – it is now somewhat of a mess, but I could not test everything on my laptop for a number of reasons, and I’d rather release early (and often).
Update 1: Nearly done with navigation. Tomorrow I will be tweaking vertical spacing, and after that there will be a systematic whittling down of formatting and colors. There will be less shades of grey and kinds of formatting (although the vast majority of formatting was already pretty uniform). And, in a few days, a few spots of color here and there – maybe I’ll go wild with pink or something…
Update 2: I think I’m now done with navigation and vertical spacing, as well as formatting. Also fixed Unicode in the feeds (not entirely my fault, actually) and, for those of you who like color, there are now some blue highlights. Next up, figuring out what to do about the site headers, some structural changes to the Wiki itself, and maybe (just maybe) an entirely new homepage.
Comments are welcome, provided you understand that this is a work in progress. There are bugs – for instance, search suggestions are currently broken (they’re not very high on my list right now).