5% of my tweets are about the internet, 94% of my tweets are about football (soccer), and the other 1% end with #FML.
It’s unpleasant when you build something that is never used. It’s rare that you build something that’s meaningful and relevant to you. This almost always means that it’s also useful to other like-minded people. This is one of those rare projects.
This was the first of two Community projects in 2012. I’ve already written about Satori. Considering that I live in Bombay, it’s strange that the first Community project was the redesign of a blog based in Malta!
Paul Grech is a well established blogger who I follow on Twitter. Since he’s already blogged about the redesign and he’s a much better writer, you can read his notes on the redesign at Blueprint.
THE REDESIGN
Since it’s hosted on Blogger, the lack of development flexibility meant that it was always going to be a pain implementing the changes. The idea was to follow House’s Razor to the tee: the best solution is the least painful [ 1 ]
The goal was simple: to bring the writing into focus. The steps involved were: i) get rid of the banner; ii) use a pleasant typeface; iii) put in some primary colours.
The redesign after 3 simple goals
I realised a couple of things: i) Constraints aren’t always a bad thing. The enforced simplicity of thought lends itself to the final presentation; ii) Under every template hides a good version of that template. If you keep removing stuff, you will find it.
CONTENT NOT IN FOCUS
I don’t understand websites where you have to scroll to bring the content into focus. The article should be in focus without that annoying 100px, 200px, sometimes 300px scroll.
It rarely starts with the content!
UNPUBLISHED ARTEFACTS I designed a couple of posters as ‘artwork’ that Paul could use on media outlets like Twitter. The posters featured the writing prowess of Simon Kuper and the interviewing ninjatsu of Sid Lowe. The writers themselves were inspired by the madness of Johan Cruijff and Juanma Lillo – two of the greatest, most eccentric thinkers of the modern games [ 2 ]
The poster features a fantastic anecdote from Simon Kuper's profile of Johan Cruijff
Type sample with my favourite Scala
Type sample with my favourite Scala
Type sample with my favourite Scala
FOOTNOTES
Theming on Blogger: It turns out that it’s not so bad. It’s easy to hack the layout with custom CSS overrides. Adding the JavaScript needed to run TypeKit was simple. Blogger also lets you backup the old theme. That theme .xml file can then be restored whenever you need it.
I wanted to manipulate the position of the author name, and the date of publishing but I remember not being able to. The markup language was unpleasant to read. I could be wrong and this could just be a case of me not figuring it out. I’ll update this if that’s the case.
All in all, it took me about 75 minutes to implement the design changes in code.
Juanma Lillo interview. You can find that quite incredible Lillo interview in the first issue of the Blizzard, a fantastic football quarterly edited and published by Jonathan Wilson. You can find the (heartbreaking!) Cruijff profile in Kuper’s ‘Soccer Men’.
