New Design
It’s been a while since I gave this site a major facelift – too long in fact. The new layout is not perfect, or finished. There are still small tweaks to come. But, it was close enough to what I wanted; time had come to release it into the wild. I’m pleased with the way […]
It’s been a while since I gave this site a major facelift – too long in fact. The new layout is not perfect, or finished. There are still small tweaks to come. But, it was close enough to what I wanted; time had come to release it into the wild. I’m pleased with the way it looks and really enjoying using the “art squiggle” as a logo (I’ve been drawing that since I was a child).
For the last few years, I had used premium themes from Graph Paper Press , which I then tweaked to suit my style. I still like Graph Paper Press a lot. They are a great company that keep on innovating. GPP designs, out of the box, are awesome; especially for photographers. But, I became very frustrated with trying to customise the themes to my (text-intensive) needs.
So, I decided to switch to Catalyst. Initially, Catalyst is very vanilla and minimal. But, you get a lot of tools that help you customise your site. In fact, you get control over just about everything and a very nice CSS generator for the bits you want to super-fine tune. I used Catalyst for other sites I’ve built recently, like The Society for Film and sgmuso, so it made sense to build my new site with it as well.
In the new design I’ve tried to correct a few things I’d grown to dislike about the previous design. I wanted the about me and contact pages to be more prominent. It was important to make the photo gallery look interesting and a little different from the norm and for the photos to be iOS-friendly. The time was right to add a disclosure page. I wanted to implement a responsive design, given that my tablet readership just keeps going up. It was important to make the site easier to navigate, with a simpler menu and more information in the sidebar. And, I wanted a SoundCloud-rich music discovery page.
Most importantly of all, I needed to make the posts and pages more readable. By far, the biggest criticisms I had about the old site had to do with readability and text layout.
So, please take a look around and let me know what you think. If you have any questions, criticisms or bugs to point out, then get in touch.
