A new website design

Well it’s more of a design refresh than anything else! If you haven’t visited the site for a while you may notice some slight design changes here and there, I thought I’d write a quick post to run through the changes.

Let’s start with the portfolio design - there’s only a few small changes here, primarily in the width of the overall portfolio. The project tiles will now extend further across the page to make better use of larger screen sizes and help showcase my design and development work.

Each project tile now also has a new hover effect that makes use of CSS3 transitions - being a motion designer I wanted to add a bit of movement to the page, something a bit more interesting than simply showing or hiding the text when a user hovers over a tile. The transition is only a small one but I think it adds quite a nice effect overall. I also had fun experimenting with the easing functions to produce the final effect.

The blog design has changed slightly too, if you’re reading this on a desktop you’ll notice the text is in the middle of the page rather than over to the left. This felt far more comfortable to me when reading a post; the focus is more on the content. This design is also used on other static pages that contain a lot of text.

Other small changes include the font across the site. Bitter is now used instead of Georgia, it’s slightly more modern while still being a nice font to read on screen.

As part of the re-design process I also took my own advice and removed the unwanted CSS files from Drupal, I also removed some of the excess markup Drupal churns out in an effort to make things slightly tidier.

Overall the changes aren’t too major, just a few small changes to the layout in places. I’m constantly finding myself tweaking areas of the site so no doubt this post will be obsolete in a few months time!