A Slightly New Look for 2007
O ver the past 3 months, I’ve been plugging away, trying to refine the design of my personal site. I’m not really sure why I do it, I don’t have a fan club, books to promote, I’m not soliciting free-lance work, and I have a total of 3 people that visit the site regularly. That said, I work in interaction design, and my personal site through all its iterations has been the best learning tool that I’ve found. I’m not the best at keeping the site updated, and it seems that I’m all too often spending way too much time tinkering with the site, when I should be working on the content. The purpose of this re-design, was to help me focus on the content.
The new site extends the look of the previous version (sans Naked Babies) and focuses more on the content. I’ve tried to create a nice flexible CMS that will allow me to customize each post, and allow for greater flexibility and employing more of a “Tumble Log” approach to the design. 
The previous version of the site complete with the cupid, possibly returning for a special Valentines Day web performance.
Inspiration
Much inspiration for the site has come from working with some great people (North Temple). I have to thank Mr. Jason Lynes (Crowd Control) for many late night IM’s and technical help trying to figure out the amazing Rails Framework, Mr. Gilbert Lee, for constantly focusing on simplicity (and for the touch of pink), and everyone else at work who help contribute to the creative environment.
I also have to give credit to Edward Tufte whose books and workshop opened my eyes to new ways of presenting information on the web.
Visual Elements
The patterns come from a great collection of Chinese Decorative Arts . The display type is “Priory Serif”, from my favorite type foundry: Emigre (You know that you are a true design geek when you spend hundreds of dollars to buy a font for your personal website).
Priory is available from Emigre, my all-time favorite font foundry.
The Big Picture
Over the next year, I’ll be focusing my attention on work, and on finishing my MFA degree. This site, along with The Cosmic Knot will become a major part of that effort. The Cosmic Knot has an identical structure and similar design, but will contain information mostly dealing with art projects and research required for my MFA thesis project.
Favorites
Looking back, I think there are a few good reads on the site. I’ve listed my favorites here for your enjoyment.
I guess you can add one more to your list of people who visit your website. I have already enjoyed many of your posts, both here and on NorthTemple.com, and I hope you keep posting. Thanks for giving me the push start into the world of css and webdesign. I look forward to learning more from you and hopefully one day we can work together. Thanks
You always find a way with words that paint the picture. All of your articles from “Make your small type a little bigger” to “How to peel a banana” (on my top ten) are well written and seem to compose all aspects of your thoughts on the particular subject. I’m hoping to reach that point with my blog and or personal site one day, but for now, I’ll continue to type in fragment sentences and blurb about odd things because all of my good thoughts have slipped through the cracks.
I need to find a way to gather thoughts and ideas while I’m pedaling the bike. It is there where I seem to make connections with the technical aspects of all my design projects be it print or web. By the time i make it home I’ve seemed to replaced those thoughts with ones of hunger and rest. I’ll continue to work on a solution for this and let you know how it goes.
The new look is great. Keep up the good work and I’ll continue to learn from your content. Thanks for all of your help in the past and I too hope that we can work together some day. The HUB maybe.
Nice change, It’s much more inviting. I came to your old site a few times and never really could get into it, I would get lost right in the beginning, I mean it was REALLY nice to look at, but seemed to lack substance. Now it has a diffrent feeling, and I think i may be returning more often.
It kinda reminds me of JasonSantaMaria’s site…
Tony & Kevin: Great to hear from you! and thanks for the kind words, I’m glad you like the new site.
Looks great John, I’m very impressed with some of the subtle details in this design.