Welcome
Hello. My name is Ryan. This is my web page. It's not really about anything. I put here all the things I have that I think the world should see. If you want to know more, you can read the about page. You'll probably want to check out the design gallery. And if you're really adventurous I think my audio files are worth a listen.
Latest Weblog Entry
Examining Slightly Shifty
Maybe someone will appreciate this. Whenever I design a page I like to think out all of the components and evaluate a few things about them. I look at how easy they are to use and understand, how easy they are to implement in a browser, and how visually attractive they are.
With my new green design, I redid almost all of the HTML across the entire site. Very little was left as it was. Now there are two sections of content: the main content, and the supporting sidebar content. You can see throughout the site I've littered various content on the sidebar. All those awkward things that didn't really have a place on the main page before. I'm really happy with the way it turned out because now more emphasis can be put on the main content areas making the site flow a lot better.
I really like the look of Helvetica so I decided to use it for all my headers. I needed a small font that looked large with the fixed-width design so I chose Verdana at 9 points (96 DPI), with tables and a few other things at 8 points. Text fills out a page much nicer and reads much easier with some space between the lines, so the line height is at 160%. Tables, the sidebar, and a few other elements have a nice 5 pixel thick border around them which adds visual interest to otherwise boring content.
The whole layout is designed around shift's beautiful Cactus III photograph. The photograph had methodical and airy greens which I toned down a bit in the top half of the photo, leaving rich green tones, and a spot to stick my header. The rest of the layout copies tones from the image. Some of them bright and saturated like the Helvetica text and navigation bar, and the rest much more subdued to offset the saturated colours.
Unlike my usual layouts, the content areas don't have much to them. There are very few lines or defining features. I specifically wanted to keep it simple to keep your eyes drawn to the header image and to not be so distracting. My previous layout had far too many components and looked slightly distracting when viewed. The fixed width was chosen only so the lines of text wouldn't stretch on too long.
When it comes right down to it I'm very proud of this layout. I think it turned out just right and is a nice deviation of the layouts I usually make. This one will probably stick around for a while. It's the one that most accurately depicts "Aquatakat.com," at least right now.
Posted by Aquatakat on Sunday, August 12th (5 Comments).