The Sheep redesign
So at last I’m finally launching this redesign, which has been on the back-burner for many months now. It always surprises me how many hours it actually takes to get a site through from conception, design, HTML and finally WordPress build stages, even when you’re trying to keep things fairly simple.
On the plus side I’m learning more and more about building templates for WordPress. Verstion 2.5.1 seems very solid. And I was really impressed by John Godley’s advanced search plugin, which provides search term highlighting in the results (just give the search on the right a try to see what I mean). It seems to be really well constructed — I’m definitely going to investigate John’s other plugins.
In this version I’ve decided to take the Sheep character a bit further and include some little cartoon sketches along with the blog posts. I draw these with pen and paper, which gets me away from the computer, and then later on scan in and re-draw with Illustrator. There’s just one in here so far: I’ve got a few more to come, just need to find the time to re-draw them.
This new site features a semi-flexible page width, which adapts to the size of the browser window. Also I concentrated on developing a consistent vertical rhythm for the typography, which should also maintain its structure pretty well as the text is resized.
Hope you like it!
Another one with pink links…
The coloured navigation items are a bit blurry/not well readable against the slate ground, but that’s a minor visual effect. It’s almost as if the colours were bleeding. This must have to do with the grey levels of both colours, which appear to be in the same range. (If you would make it a black and white picture, both colours would blend seamlessly.)
That’s the only odd thing I noticed at first sight. I also wonder why you have arrows and underlines as hand-drawn effects; and the arrow doesn’t point in a direction, but it starts an article? Some underlines are straight while others are hand drawn. But again those are just minor questions.
Henning von Vogelsang at 7:29 am on 27 May 08
Yeah, I did wonder about the contrast on the navigation. Maybe I should try to lighten the pink a bit more there. The constraint is I want to make it appear to the be same colour as all the other links, for consistency.
admin at 9:42 am on 27 May 08
I think it looks awesome! Love the little hand-drawn accents here and there.
Joel at 7:57 pm on 30 May 08