[col-sect][column]A few notes on recent one-seventh design improvements. I love the typeface Gill Sans, especially in all-caps with a bit of letter spacing – it’s what the title image is set in. So I’ve expanded its use to include article titles. And so you say, “But Patrick, isn’t that bad web-design, using an unsafe font, using a font you know won’t render on most people’s machines as it is not a prepackaged Windows font.” And I say, “Yeah it’s probably bad web design IF your intent is for the site to look as similar as possible across all browsers AND if your intent is for a broad audience.” Pretty sure the blog is read by a few broads, but even so, I just don’t care. If you really back up and take in the big picture, you have to accept that this site is written and designed by and for me. I am the chief audience. Let’s face it, running a blog is a massive exercise in self-indulgence. I’m not going to deny that. So that on the record, it becomes a short hop in deduction to then say the only browser the site has to look amazing in is the one I am using. Which it does. And in case my position on this is not yet clear, let me add: until the internet apologizes for the ridiculous imposition it has caused us because it is fundamentally half-assed and flawed at the core, retracts itself from general circulation, takes itself back to the lab for a top down redesign before re-emerging in a proper form, this whole browser compatibility objective is world scale Affen Theater. Sites should look the same for all machines. That would be nice. But not going to happen.

Continuing with the refinements: The white space between posts has been shortened from something like 175 pixels down to 50. Not sure what I was thinking before. But each post was looking like an island floating in the white space, but now together they appears more continuous.

The byline has been removed. So how will you know who wrote an article? I struggled with that. Why. The byline is administrative debris. It contributes clutter, yet providesinformation of only marginal relevance given [/column][column]that most readers will know I am the author and probably don’t really care when an article was published. On the other hand, the byline is the only blogger identification for first time visitors, and the only text that Google would pick up to associate my name to this blog. Vexing. So once again hard decisions must be made. The decision logic is thus: Google sucks. To get yourself all worked up for your site to be better recognized by a system that rewards popularity over quality doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me. I have plenty of evidence to support my assertion that Google sucks… exhibit A is YouTube. The way it looks (ugly and amateurish), the way it works (badly), the user-interface design (unbelievably poor). Enough said. The prosecution rests. That decision accepted, the byline rationale is feeble. So it gets removed from the main page flow and demoted to a place at the bottom of the single post page (click an article title to see), in very light grey.

The byline does now include categories though. And categories and search have been added to the archives page. So go nuts.

Getting finer in scale, the page numbers at the bottom of the main page are now without boxes and are set in Futura, as are the the numbers that indicate the publish date on the archive page. And a minor change to the “1” icon: it, and the relatively new “7th” icon, are also in Fututra and a bit shorter in height. And so you say ,“Hey man, the title is in Gill Sans but the icons are in Futura? Give me a break. Unrigorous.” True. And there are similarities between the two, but you’re right: not interchangeable. Here’s the thing and this is how decisions are made: I prefer the numbers of Futura and the letters of Gill Sans. So hey the intro image at the top of the page (third square from the left) also has text of both typefaces: the “1/7th” (yes, including the “th” actually) are in Futura and the rest of the sentence is in Gill Sans.[/column][/col-sect]

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