I’ve become increasingly annoyed with my blog’s design. It’s …too much. There’s a sidebar, there’s a tag cloud, there’s the archives, there’s whatnots and doodads and stuff. Funny; a few months ago I’ve installed it to make the site more lightweight, and had the feeling I had succeeded. (Take a look at my still unchanged tumblelog to see the old design.)
Still, over the last few weeks I felt the urge to further strip it down.
Is less more? Well… I think so. Less clutter, less noise, less fluff. (At least outside the blog posts.) Let’s focus on the actual meat! If there is any.
Plus I’ve tried to read one of my posts using the highly useful Instapaper application on my iPod touch, in its text mode, and got seriously annoyed. So much crap to scroll through just to get to the actual article – archive, tag cloud, about blurb etc.
This warranted a change.
So, taking a lot of inspiration and hints of Jack Shedd and Ryan Tomayko – read: fusing their wonderful respective designs into a freaky bastard child – I’ve managed to come up with a light and mostly clutter-free layout that’s both easy on the eyes and pleasing Instapaper’s text mode1.
I’ve removed everything I’ve deemed unnecessary. Like the sidebar, the external links, the archive, the list of tags, the blurbs, the doodads and whatnots. The article display has been cleaned up and I’ve removed the “related pages” section. Internally, I’ve switched the site from Textile to Markdown, and fully migrated the comments from the built-in Wordpress system to Disqus.
I am pretty happy with the results.
It looks fine in both Safari 3 and Firefox 3. It’s a bit broken in IE6 (big surprise), and I don’t have an IE7 here right now. But since I’m slighly drunk at the moment, I don’t really care. I’m not a designer, clearly, but I think it’s good nonetheless. :)
Huzzah!
Update: Looks good in MSIE 7, 8 and Opera 9.5x. Thank you, Browsershots.
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I really like that app. ↩︎
