Let me explain the new and rather half-baked look. It's been well over a year since I moved this blog to TypePad. I did it in a hurry, because Blogger was making it impossible to continue what I'd been doing. I picked a canned design which I didn't care much for but which at least was not offensive. I've long since gotten really sick of it, but couldn't seem to make time to do much about it. I tinkered around with it and saved several variations, but all of them had problems of one kind or another.
Well, I'm really pretty sick of looking at the old format, and still having a really difficult time getting all the colors etc. right on one of the new templates, so I decided to do what you have to do to make yourself swim in cold water, or at least what I have to do: just jump. The more you try to ease into it, the more you keep drawing back.
This isn't finished. At a minimum I will be playing around with the colors (you might be surprised at how many different color specifications are used in this design). For instance, the main background and that of the header image are supposed to be the same color. But now that I have to see it every time I look at the blog, I will have the motivation to keep working on it. Please bear with me. And opinions and suggestions are welcome (although I can't promise I'll use them).
Light On Dark Water 
26 responses to “Forcing Myself to Jump”
Well, I liked the old look, but I look forward to what new design you decide on 🙂
Did you? I thought it was terribly bland. And not dark enough.:-)
Oh, I thought it was a subtle kind of dark; atmospheric in a way 🙂
Aw, now I’m going to second-guess myself…I really want a graphic header, though, and I really didn’t like all that light blue…
These new colours are easier to read, and I really like the graphic header that’s up there now.
I don’t much like the current colour of the blogrolls on the right side. Too yellow.
I am notorious as a foe of yellow.
What blue?
It’s odd, that Craig says these colors are easier to read because I’m having trouble reading.
AMDG
I understand that focus groups rarely achieve unanimity.
The sidebar was very pale blue with brighter blue text.
Actually the old design looks better to me now…
I expect I’m going to end up with more text/background contrast, so it should be easier to read. And I agree that the sidebar is much too yellow–it was supposed to be a much lighter and less yellow shade, more of a yellowish/brownish off-white.
The thing that makes it so easy to procrastinate on this is that the colors have to be specified as 2-digit hexadecimal numbers indicating quantities of red, blue, and green. Black is #000000 and white is #ffffff. #ff0000 is pure red. Etc. I think this background is #dedecc. So experimenting gets pretty tedious–take a guess at the value, edit the file, save it, preview it, take another guess, save, preview, etc. There are color pickers that can help but still you can’t really tell what a background is going to look like until you try it–like looking at a paint chip in the store and trying to decide how it will look covering a wall.
It was? I can’t picture that at all.
I remember formatting Yahoo Groups and having to deal with those numbers. I don’t envy you having to do it.
AMDG
I just posted a screen shot of the old design. I really hate the sidebar but the rest of it is not too bad. If I could just add the banner graphic and tweak the colors…oh yeah, that’s how I ended up with this. Well, this looks so bad, I will definitely be forced to mess with it some more this weekend. If we don’t have a hurricane.
You’re right! I remember it now. Please don’t have a hurricane.
AMDG
I’ll try (not to have a hurricane).
The main reason I comment less is I hate the way it flows backward. Cough.
I can’t remember whether there is an option to have it the other way or not. But this rings a faint bell–maybe there is, and there was a discussion about it? I don’t know, maybe I’ll try it the other way, if it’s available. I do remember that the intermediate system on the old blog, when Haloscan was replaced by whatever it was, was really horrible.
When you last went from one design to another, and possibly from one blog island to another, the com boxes changed direction. You said you could not change it. I just don’t enjoy reading a discussion backward. But it is probably unalterable now. I just thought I’d mention it while you are working on it.
I think it’s coming back to me now: the new commenting system on the old blog forced things into fairly small pages, so if you had more than say 10 comments you had to keep clicking to get to another page. If there were many comments, this was maddening–it was better to see the last one first.
I see the order can in fact be changed here, and I just did. Up to 50 comments to a page, with option to change it to 100. That ought to be enough to prevent next-ing. Let’s see how we like this.
I like having the graphic at the top. I seriously am having trouble with the comments on the darker background.
AMDG
It’s funny, I don’t remember noticing that the comments alternated backgrounds like that. Maybe it was a less noticeable difference.
If you’re having that much trouble with the comments, you’re having just as much with the posts. They look the same to me.
Yes. I am. Worse because they are longer.
Maybe if I make them big.
AMDG
Yeah, that’s better.
AMDG
I probably won’t get a chance to tinker with it until Saturday. Hope you can stand it till then.
This is a huge improvement! thanks. Expect dozens of irrelevant remarks.
Looking forward to it.
Amazing how much difference a monitor makes. This looks way better on my work machine than at home. And both of those are LCD–older CRT monitors no doubt look much different, and less crisp. I should at least try it in some other browsers, too. That’s part of the frustration of trying to get a good design. You never know what other people are seeing.
I just increased the contrast somewhat by making the background lighter and the text darker. Is that any better?
Most shots in films are based on what is called a ‘dramatic contrast’
There’s a good reason why books are generally printed with black ink on white paper.