I’ve changed fonts again and increased the base font size as well. Let me know if you have any comments. Next up: font colors.

If you have any suggestions I’d love to hear them…

I wrote recently about re-evaluating the font I use here on the site, as well as some other design elements. Well let me show you what it looks like when you know what you’re doing.

This guy, Rod Graves, has it down. Simplicity is the key to many things, including a clean, sophisticated feeling web site. I particularly like this page that I got the image above from: http://www.rodgraves.com/profile/.

I mean just look at how clean that is. I’ve spent hours scrubbing the web for this kind of quality, and this is where I’m taking my site as I move forward with it, keeping two ideas in the forefront:

1. Content
2. Presentation

As either one suffers so does the other.:

So I’ve been doing a little work with my typography. I’ve changed my font-size and line-height to em measurements, and I’ve increased their sizes as well. How does this look? The idea is to be more readable without getting so large as to appear childish.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Q: What did one em say to the other em?

A: Who’s your daddy?

So I’m getting ready to do some major reworking of my design. The guiding force will be the 100% Easy to Read Standard. The first bit of this I did just now by making the default font 13px instead of 12px. Let me know what you guys think.

Here’s a quote I like from the IA site:

95% of what is commonly referred to as web design is typography.

Nice. In addition to that shift I’m also going to a new color scheme and maybe even a different layout. It’s going to be major. On change I’m nearly decided on is going to a white background. Lots of ideas…

Anyway, let me know if you guys like the larger font.

Tell me this doesn’t support the argument that oral sex was designed by God as well. Oh, and why would that not include gay oral sex too? Oops — probably not his intention. His argument from design is seriously underwhelming, but at least it succeeded in making creationists look silly.

Kirk Cameron from “Groin Pains” is the guy on the right. I think he laughs there towards the end because he suddenly realized how gay this whole thing looks. Here are some choice quotes:

1. “The contents don’t squirt in your face.”
2. “Notice it has a point at the top for ease of entry.”
3. “It’s just the right shape for the human mouth” (makes an o-face)
4. “And it’s even curved toward the face to make the whole process so much easier.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

To add insult to injury there’s the small issue of the banana he’s holding being a product of man’s design. Wild bananas don’t look anything like what he’s holding. We select and cultivate the bananas we see every day for characteristics desirable to us. Yet another victory for creationism.:

15all.files

I have a new design philosophy. It’s called 100% Easy to Read. Here are the highlights:

• Don’t tell us to adjust the font size
• Don’t tell us busy pages look better
• Don’t tell us scrolling is bad
• Don’t tell us text isn’t important (95% of “web design” is typography)
• Don’t tell us to get glasses (use a font-size that’s large enough)

Here are the 5 basic rules:

1.  Standard font size for long texts
2. Active white space
3. Reader-friendly line height
4. Clear color contrast
5. No text in images

There are two other concepts that jumped out at me: using text as an interface, and the understanding that typography is not the art of selecting typefaces. Typography is so much more.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the presentation of my text lately. Until now it’s been about the formatting of the text within the post itself, but now I’m thinking more about the look of the entire page and site.

I’m going to be doing a lot with this in coming weeks and months. I at least have an idea of what I want; now I just need to get there. I thank the heavens for CSS.:

Sorry for the limp post; I’m testing some CSS trickery.

This should be red. (even though direct colorization is a no-no)

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hermes root # tcpdump -nnvXSs 1514 -c2 icmp
tcpdump: listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 1514
bytes 23:11:10.370321 IP (tos 0x20, ttl  48, id 34859, offset 0, flags
[none], length: 84) 69.254.213.43 > 72.21.34.42: icmp 64: echo request seq 0

lsof -i :25

find /var/localhost/www/htdocs -type d -prin0 | grep -0 xargs chmod 755 

I’ve merged my CSS files for my blog content and my non-blog content into a single CSS. Any formatting weirdness you’re seeing is at least in part due to this change.

On that note, what formatting/styling issues do you guys see on the site? Anything standing out to you as bad? Any ideas for improvements? Now that the main parts of my theme are mostly finished I’m moving into CSS mode. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

This is how fast I hope my site will be once I am done building my own custom theme. Maybe not quite as fast since my regular theme has more images and such, but pretty close.

Click on a few stories and check out how fast things are loading. Not only does this theme allow me to use wp-cache, but I’ve also placed my cache directory on a RAM drive on my server.

The site currently feels extremely responsive to me. Does it to you guys as well?