[col-sect][column]I woke up on the floor at around 8:00 this morning in yesterday’s jeans and dress shirt, walked 4 feet to my desk, sat down and picked up fine-tuning the website’s look from where I left off last night. It’s now 7:23 pm. And I’m starving. The changes:

The title is in full width of the main column and in a deep grey. I selected the Cochin typeface. Back when I was in architecture school it was pretty much unheard of to use a serif font on any of your drawings or papers. But back in the day I came to appreciate Garamond because the x-height (distance between the baseline and the median; corresponds to the height of the lower-case “x”) is proportionally short and allows the ascenders and Caps to sing. Very elegant. I actually ended up publishing my thesis in Garamond… in italics actually. How about that. Cochin has also got a low x-height, but has a bit of attitude as well (check out the height of the “h”.

I’ve added pipe navigation in the upper right. Up until now I’ve resisted this kind of UI device because it’s just so conventional. But I tried it (among many other options) and I felt that it made the site feel more grown up. Somehow. More mature. Ready to look like a real website. Hopefully the navigation is helpful to users as well. Not as cryptic as previous versions; more clear.

I’ve added a link to a gallery. Much of what this site is is imagery, so I wanted to combine many of the images from the site in one place so that users won’t have to hunt around for them. Also quite powerful to see them collected. I’ve uploaded only a portion of the images so far, so check on the gallery in coming days as I continue to add more.

The square image links for the gallery and for the “about” page now have a bit descriptive text beneath them to clarify where it will take you. Seemed to be the right thing to do. Once again, there’s a balance between minimizing administrative debris and making the site useful. I was reluctant at first, preferring a clean and mean theme, but got comfortable with it after the mock-up sunk into my acceptitiude. Words plus image; it ain’t the latest thing. The typeface for this small text is Hoefler. And yes, it would have been more rigourous to use the same typeface for navigation text and the title, but Cochin looked better as a title and Hoefler looked better as nav-text. I tried every combination and many other typefaces as well. So there ya be.[/column]

[column]Twitter posts have now graduated from a cryptic list of 8 updates on a page sidebar to their own dedicated page. This page is available from the “μ-blog” link in the top corner; and please check it out because this took me most of the day to pull off. An unbelievable pain in the ass. A bit of a design challenge to somehow separate the post from the meta data, without having the link below scream out on the page. But actually the tough part was struggling with the coding to make it look how I had designed it in the mock-up. The indents etc. Frustrating. I know, it sounds silly, but trust me it looks way better now than the previous 85 trials and 85 errors. But I think all the fighting paid off. The little triangle bullets bring attention to the posts without relying on the conventional disc shape bullet, and the consitency of the meta text below helps the page read as still fairly quiet. I may continue to fiddle, but am actually quite pleased to have got it this far. By the way I still hate the fucking word “Twitter.” The lack of masculinity in the name itself is bothersome and at times makes me not want to be involved with the entire idea, but now that I see 30 posts listed off in the main own of my own site (with limited appearance of the word “Twitter”), I feel strong potential for making updates – like maybe I should actually be writing sharper twitters. We’ll see. I’m actually not crazy about the term “micro-blog” either, but to me it beats the hell out of “Twitter”

Working on this site is a labour of love; a kind of craft for which I have little knowledge of how to operate the tools (I fumble my way through code). My toil on this ongoing design exercise I guess is a substitute for other kinds of design exercise in my life. But the nice part about crafting this site for me though is that there is no compromising. I do it how I want; or at least I try. A rare experience for an architect.

Update:

I hear that the navigation text is looking pixelated in Firefox and IE. Frankly, IE, I could give a fuck about – I’m not going to apologize; there’s just no excuse for using IE. The site looks brilliantly beautiful and smooth in Safari on the Mac. But I’ll make required changes in the coming days. At this point in the evening,  I’ve had enough for one day.[/column][/col-sect]

Previous article:      Role reversal
Next article:     Bigg Dee at Gigi’s on Davie