Grey as Rain

Screenshot of an Early Prototype Version of This Blog - Very Grey!The blog redesign is progressing.

I’m pretty happy with most of the generated code right now and will now start cranking out the css. Right now everything is default grey – perhaps subconsciously inspired by the weather outside my window? It is my own twist of Jason Santa Maria’s Grey Box Method for wireframing web sites, but I do my prototyping in XHTML+CSS instead of Photoshop (a horrible truth just hit me: this probably means that I’m more of a coder than a designer…).

Some design decisions taken along the way:

  • Latest article featured – The latest post is probably the most interesting one for most visitors (guesswork obviously, have to back this up with usage statistics later) so it should receive the most screen real estate.
  • No sidebar – Allows for nice readable width for the text and big pictures at the same time plus it allows for some cool design solutions, such as…
  • Horizontal archives listing – A new approach to archives brought about by the decision of going with no sidebar. This will function more like the WordPress calendar than the regular, vertical archive list.
  • About box, no About page – At the moment, I haven’t got enough stuff to write in the About section to warrant a whole page so a box should be enough for now

1 Comment »

  1. Emma - June 29, 2007 at 11:13

    I think that a persons background when it comes to webdesign has a lot to do with how he/she works today. When I did my first website I started with the code right away. The “design” was just in my head. Back then it was more important to play with blink and marquee-tags then to figure out how it would look in the end. I was more fascinated with the code than the design process – still am.

    Doing the whole design in Photoshop feels really redundant. A worse case scenario would be that my skills in Photoshop (or should I say ‘lack of skills’?) would actually restrict me from doing what I see in my head. Why not use a pen and a paper? I most certainly would not be able to aply the Photoshop process in my work as a newspaper design editor. Sometimes, when I feel that the articles I’m working with are really complex, I have to sketch on paper. But then I keep it on a very basic level. It’s only for straightening out the mess in my head just a little bit so I know what elements I’m working with. Of course I realize that using Photoshop doesn’t really apply to me – since it would be pointless to use one design program (Photoshop) before actually doing the real design in another (Indesign). But still.

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