Posts Tagged typekit

Blog redesign

I have been posting more frequently lately, and felt that the longer entries were not very readable. This led me to spend some time last weekend attempting a bit of a redesign of this site. I’m not a designer, but I’m hoping this is an improvement over the previous templates. As this is my own site I made the decision to use some CSS3 for elements of the design leaving non-supporting browsers to just render these elements without the detail of rounded corners and opacity and so on. I wouldn’t take this approach in many places, but for this site I’m happy with that decision and the site is perfectly usable without rounded corners!

I also took the chance to have a play with Typekit to render a font for the heading. I haven’t used Typekit before and clients have been asking me about it so I thought this was a chance to see how well it works and how tricky it is to implement. I was really impressed with the ease in which I could implement Typekit, it really is as simple as choosing a font, adding a couple of lines of JavaScript and then assigning which bits of text will be rendered. After battling with sIFR on a number of projects this was a breeze.

To try and make my text more readable I read through and implemented some tips from The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, the background image is from istockphoto member smilewithjul and I found COLOURlovers helpful in coming up with a neutral colour scheme. I thought I might use some different background images in future so I wanted to have a colour scheme that would work with different backgrounds. I used the Starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks as a starting point to save me having to clean up WordPress templates myself.

This was a very quick attempt to tidy up the site over the weekend, and if I get chance I’d like to add some things to it. Your comments are very welcome, especially with regard to the readability of the blog posts as that was something I wanted to sort out.