I just switched Nobody’s Business over to version 1.1 of our theme. Basically, we were getting a bit tired of the traditional orange, and trying to find other colors that go with it was straining my limited design skills. So Rogier asked the artist who creates our banners — Len Peralta — to redo them in blue. I then used the banners to clip out new background images for the headers in the sidebars. I also made the comments stand out a little more on each post, and cleaned up a few things here and there.
So what do you think?
To me, the site now looks a bit too whimsical. I think the design should be a little more staid, with the cartoons providing a whimsical counterpoint. Maybe I should change the sidebar headers to something more plain. Also, the titles for the posts look too big for the rest of the page. And I think I could probably get away with making the main text slightly smaller.
We’ve been kicking around a few more substantial design changes. I’d like to get rid of the block banner image and replace it with more of a header area, filled with information and links. We’re also thinking of abanding the traditional blog format for more of a news magazine look, which would allow us to show excerpts of the latest stories above the fold (so to speak).
This looks nice but I think that the magazine format would work well, especially since there are multiple posters here nowadays.
And those of us who already have to don their cheap drugstore reading glasses in order to surf the web appreciate a larger body text. I don’t think you need to bring the font size down on that.
That was kind of my theory when I designed this blog with the text as big as it is (and for using plain old black-on-white instead of something fancy), especially since a lot of people read blogs on portable gadgets.
But I think if we want to go the route of the magazine format, we’d need to use a smaller font size to fit enough teaser material for each of the articles we’d feature on the front page. For example, the New York Times uses fonts that are 12px high in my browser. ScienceBlogs goes down to 11px for some items. By comparison, this comment will post at 13px, and the main body of the blog post is 15px high.
Good riddance to the stupid Orange and its implicit message of violent, radical Dutch Nationalism.
I agree with you about the “whimsical” thing.