Recently I had the pleasure of redesigning my good friend Ryan Warnberg’s personal blog and migrating it into WordPress. Ryan lives in New York and works for a rather large record label doing various tasks to keep him busy and paid. He often writes witty, humorous, world/music/life observations and sometimes gory zombie stories. I have enjoyed reading his blog for the past year or two and jumped at the opportunity to redesign it.
A year or so ago Ryan came to me for a business card design and we both dug the result. I decided to take a similar approach with his blog design; utilizing strong, colorful imagery and font colors on top of a dark background. I feel the header is incredibly strong and immediately gets a reaction from viewers. I never go too crazy in styling “leave a reply” forms or contact forms but like them to appear clean and well-spaced. I enjoy the subtle color variations in the design (often too subtle on a Windows-monitor but great on a Mac).
For the typography,
I chose one of my most frequently used, favorite fonts, ITC Avant Garde Gothic™ for his logo and slogan. I transferred all his previous posts (namedropacid.blogspot.com) with mixed results. Many of the posts past the first page might appear out-of-whack because the styling is so different, images bust out of divs, broken video scripts, etc. So from now on when he posts, I’ll be checking in every once in a while to see if we can revise and/or further the styling more, in an effort to better serve his posts. Consistency in the way type is handled along with supporting imagery, videos, music, media is extremely important. Not only does it make the content more easily consumed, it just looks sexy and clean.
I always love playing around with WordPress and constantly learn new ways to think about web design techniques and improve upon my own list of best practices. I will usually jump at any opportunity to design for a WordPress blog. Well, I love designing websites period but especially if they are being integrated into WordPress.
As a designer, I’m always striving to make more complex designs look clean, organized and effortless. Mainly in designing e-commerce sites because they have so many elements to style and organize. It’s a thrill to experiment with different ways of presenting the content.
The sIFR Problem
When it’s called for, or deemed appropriate, I like to utilize the awesome Flash-based text-replacement script called sIFR because it allows you to use any font you want (have installed) on your website (instead of the boring system web-safe fonts or using an image-replacement technique), while still being SEO friendly and degrading nicely. Unfortunately it is still a bit wonky when it comes to assigning the chosen font a link. Rather, the styling doesn’t work quite right when applied to a sIFR-replaced link. So, in an effort to keep it simple I chose to use the standard system font Arial and I think it serves the website well, though I plan on replacing all the headers with sIFR once the script works well for links. I’m actually mentioning this in an effort to see if anyone has consistently achieved using sIFR for linked text.
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Anyway, let me know what you think!
Thanks for reading granglers.
