Welcome to the fourth version of Nefarious Designs!
What started as a fairly simple re-alignment ended up being a complete redesign; primarily to change the focus of the site. The latest iteration is concentrated more towards my blog - hopefully allowing me to start writing some informative posts.
Branding
I chose to continue using the indigo colour (hex value #666699 for all you webbies) because I feel it compliments the Nefarious Designs logo. It also allowed me to use some subtle coloured gradients in my header and footer that help to frame the main body of the site.
Of course, the fact that my Gravatar doesn’t have to change is an added bonus!
Typography
For the last year or so, I’ve become a bit of a web typography nut and I wanted my site to reflect some of the values I have learned. For this reason, I concentrated on reducing font usage to the following three faces:
- Placard Condensed - My logo font.
- Trebuchet - Used for the majority of text on the site, Trebuchet is the best web-safe sans-serif font in my humble opinion. It’s easy to read and looks nice; two valuable qualities in achieving optimum typography.
- Tahoma - I’m using Tahoma throughout the site for smaller text. This is because it manages to look fantastic at a smaller scale than all the other web-safe sans-serif fonts.
I’ve also concentrated on improving the line-heights, the measure and the font-size of text within Nefarious Designs to improve readability.
Fantastic Elastic!
The new site is also elastic in layout; stretching between 770 and 990 pixels to maximise on available screen space (not, however, in current versions of Internet Explorer - some features of CSS just aren’t available).
Thanks
Thanks should go out to Stuart, over at Muffin Research, for being a good mate and allowing me to bounce ideas off of him, for testing the site and for being available on GTalk at obscenely late hours of the day.
