Last week, I spent a productive week near Lagos, Portugal, finishing my upcoming book. As part of this book, I’ve spent time working on a canon of page construction for websites –- a set of guidelines for aesthetically pleasing layouts – and this blog design is built using those rules.

What's wrong with the previous design?

Nothing. As a design exercise -- using just Georgia and emulating letterpress books –- it was a good one. The drop caps that I had commissioned where great (and not going to waste, incidently. I have other plans for those). But, the single page homepage view was restrictive. It was forcing me into writing articles rather than blog posts as every post had to be worthy of just one page. A multiple view of blog posts just didn't work with the design. All of this added up to a redesign. Plus, the opportunity to tie it into some of the thinking i've been doing with book was too much of an opportunity.

A case for design exploration

This blog is a place for me to experiment. For me to post things I like, or want to reference. To write about all manner of stuff that interests me. Over the past couple of years, my blog hasn't felt my own, to a degree. It's felt like I've been writing for an audience, posting stuff for others rather than myself. That's arse-backwards. A blog should be about personal expression. The moment you start thinking, and writing, to please others then it's a bind; it feels less like a personal exercise and more of a job. That's what happened, and actually, that leads me onto the next point...

What no comments?

Nope. No comments. I think, by and large, the time has past whereby comment threads provide useful discourse. Twitter's now the place where people directly talk to me. I may turn comments on for the odd post, but they'll mostly be off.

Tumblr-esque

I did toy with the idea of ditching Wordpress altogether and heading over to Tumblr as the software modelled pretty much exactly how I wanted to start blogging again. But after a period of trying to fathom out the best approach, I thought I'd stick with Wordpress and use Feedwordpress to pull in my Delicious bookmarks. This means, as I'm browsing, I can quickly fire off a link to Delicious, tag it, add a description and it'll appear here.

So, that’s about it. Nothing spectacular. A touch of responsive design thrown in, the outstanding HTML5 Boilerplate, Elliot’s Starkers theme and a wee bit of Typekit. It’s probably bust in a few places, and it’s just bare bones in others. But, it’s start.