All Change… Again
So with the recent change to my site design, and by change, i really mean cleaning up. I thought that it was best to explain what’s been happening in around my site, work and fixed gear bike world at the moment. Click through to read about everything and anything that i’ve been doing since my last blog post.
WARNING: Very long blog post ;)
CSS3, HTML5 and Typography
I do this too much. Although this carnation of my site has been the longest standing at a grand old age of 9 months. I go through phases with my site, sometimes i want to have something that sings and dances with all the awesomeness that is available to me these days, for example, without using images we as web designers can use drop shadows, rounded corners, gradients and other little things that previously we would steer away from due to either connotations of cheesiness or just because it didn’t look that good.
With all the lovely CSS3 classes and elements that are rapidly becoming the norm in this line of work, and with my new found love and passion for beautiful web typography, i felt like i should dabble with some of this new world, by using a *non web font* on a few of my headings. So i tried to use something that was as close to my personal logo as possible, after a while of scouring the web i went with the awesome Museo Slab because this is a cheaper alternative and as close as i’m going to get to Archer, without having to buy an extended license for Archer (££££’s).
Maybe about a week ago, after a few weeks/months of using Museo, i just started to dislike the look of my site and i even started to doubt myself using Myriad as my body font. Originally, i used Helvetica as the main body font, but this quickly becomes very boring and similar. I decided to switch this right back to the beginning of my personal site (which, when i checked, has been live for nearly 6 years!). This site, as of writing this, is using Lucida Grande as the main body font, but with Helvetica as the heading font on some pages (sometimes Lucida in a large size looks a little weird).
As for the HTML5 side of my site. I use my site as a sort of testing ground for new HTML5 elements that i am learning how to use. There’s no better place to learn things than in a real world situation in my opinion.
When i first built my site in HTML5, i didn’t really know what i was properly doing, so it was all a big learning curve. Now, i feel like i’ve learnt a lot more, so i rebuilt most of the pages, the biggest change being my Portfolio and About page. These 2 pages are by no means equal in importance. My portfolio is obviously the most important page on my site and i’ve never ever had a page that i was 100% happy with to display my work. This has changed. I now *LOVE* my portfolio page. The work on there is 10 times what it used to be and the way it’s presented on the page is now exactly how i wanted it in the first place, but never knew how to do it. The about page is now a lot tidier and easier to read thanks to the columned layout and smaller picture that was originally taking away from the text.
There is still so much for me to learn with regards to CSS3 and HTML5 and i will be striving to build a lot more sites using them.
New Work
I’ve been pretty busy recently with some awesome new clients and few properly brilliant projects. One being PRJCTGRZLY which i am completely stoked about. This should be dropping early next week along with my very first iPhone app hopefully :) so very excited about this. You can see all the new work that i’ve been producing on my Portfolio but I’ve also included some of it below for you all to have a look at.
Empty
As you may have seen below, there is no comments form anymore. This is a personal decision based on a conversation that i had with one of my good friends Jasper (who also removed comments from his blog – check it out, it’s beautiful).
I’ve always hated captcha’s on blog comment forms and i could never be bothered to go and block spam comments on my blog (i was always too busy doing other more important things), so every morning i would open my inbox to see the best part of 200+ spam comment email notifications sat in a little folder, annoying me! Mixed in with all the spam, i would maybe find 4 real comments. So i decided to get rid. Sorry, that’s not the only reason, one of the other reasons is that it kind of looked a bit cluttered having a comments form on every blog post i put out.
Forms aren’t exactly the prettiest of things anyway, especially when you encounter the cross browser styling problems. I know this is changing quickly and if i put the effort in, i could have a beautiful looking comments form, but this really isn’t high on my priority list. Maybe in the future i will sit down and completely redo the blog template, but right now, i love my blog design and it will definitely be staying.
Fixed Gear
Just to add this in wherever i can :) A couple of weeks ago i was out riding with a couple of local fixed gear riders and we were riding around the docklands area of Preston. We stopped for a little while and as i was setting off i realised that i had a flat back tyre. No Biggy! I just got the spare out of my bag and started to change it, got to maybe the 10th pump on my little hand pump, and the valve blew!! Now bearing in mind that i’m not really an angry person, this just really pissed me off!
No idea why i did it, and immediately after, i regretted it… i threw my entire rear wheel across the car-park, resulting in it hitting a curb and thereby putting a huge dent in the rim, thus rendering it useless because as soon as the tyre hit the bent/sharp section of the rim, it just torn itself and the inner tube!
We were about 2/3miles away from town/my house and i just knew that i was going to be walking for a while in the pitch black, freezing cold to get back home. ANNOYED!!
Completely my fault, i should obviously learn to control my aggression :| i scared myself a little bit… Anyway, this meant that i needed to get a new rear wheel. Very kindly, Mr Rob Helm, said that i could borrow his old rear wheel for a while until i got mine either rebuilt or bought a new one!
It was the latter. I have this bad-boy on order as i type this! So excited for when this arrives in England! I can see more fixed gear bike updates in the pipeline.
(not the actual wheel, mine has a black hub, and this image is from here)