Welcome to the Doodle Bush Edition
I just moved to the United Kingdom from The Netherlands and enrolled at University to study Graphic Arts: Plenty of reasons to give my own site a complete makeover. Not that I have not been dying to do that for some time, but…
I have added a little bit more colour, increased the font-size, added a couple of illustrations and jumped from a three column to a two column layout. I added a real homepage, completely revised both the portfolio and the weblog archive page, and despite that I believe that I only realigned my site. (vs. redesigning it)
Of course, I am dying for some feedback, so dig in, get out of your RSS reader, scroll down and write some comments for me.
There are still a couple of minor bugs that need to be fixed, sharp edges that need to be filed, but up to now I am extremely happy with this redesign.
Over next few coming days I will outline the design process for this realign/redesign, starting with the sketchbook, grid choices and general planning.
After that it will get messy with CSS, Javascript and all the other horrors that one faces when redesigning a website. In the meantime (I must have mentioned it before) start commenting…
// kristarella
Monday, October 15th 2007
at 3:08 AM
I love it! The sketchy drawing style is really unique and adds heaps of character, while the whole page feel is still clean and easy to navigate. The large font size is nice. Big fonts look a bit ‘grandma’ on some sites, but you seem to have a nice balance, it’s easy to read.
Only two complaints - there seems to be some jittering when scrolling. I’m using Camino (for mac), don’t know if it’s browser specific jittering, don’t know if yu could do anything about it either… it’s not too annoying.
The other is that the remember and notify options under the comment box are out of alignment - the text is about 3/4 of a line below the check boxes.
Otherwise very cool! Have no comparison to before though, this is my first visit :)
// Michael from Pro Blog Design
Tuesday, October 16th 2007
at 0:00 AM
I love it. It feels so artsy. The header image and comment background here are designs that you just don’t find around the place. It really makes the site stand out. :D
The one thing I noticed was that the text seems to be very heavy. Is there a lot of bold? (On the homepage+sidebar in particular), and the blog headlines should be clickable. :)
Great work!
Michael
// Dominik Lenk
Tuesday, October 16th 2007
at 0:40 AM
Thanks for the feedback so far. There are still some issues with the site and I will definitely look into fixing all of them. However, right now I am just glad that the site is live again.
@kristarella: You are right, Camino is a little jittery. I will have a look if I can fix that, but I think that it is because I use quite a bit of SIFR.
About the checkboxes: I missed that completely, but a little bit of extra CSS should remedy it.
@Micheal: You are right, the text is quite heavy, although it depends on your browser. There is quite a bit of cssified boldness in the small type, however, I think that it is necessary: Lucida Grande just looks a bit thin otherwise.
It would be awesome, if other people could give me some feedback on readability, as it is always a little, well… you cannot discuss taste.
Thanks again for the feedback.
// Armen
Friday, October 19th 2007
at 13:21 PM
I know how much I appreciate feedback, so, just to add, I think it’s very legible, and there’s no jittering in Firefox on XP.