August 08, 2004
time for a change
I think this blog needs a facelift. I'm actually finding the current state of design, especially colors, to be very uninspiring and I think I'm posting less than I would if it was something I really enjoyed looking at. It was a solid design that fit me well for quite a while but now I want something a lot more upbeat and colorful.
I'd really like to take a few days and dive into a big redesign and template cleanup but with my busy work schedule and health issues still taking a solid bite out of my non-work hours, that's just not gonna happen anytime soon.
So I'm reaching out, once again, to all of you great web designers who read this blog (even if only occasionally.) If you like what you get here and you'd like to contribute something back, how about a new style sheet!
I'd like to continue to include the cute Firefox image over there to the left and I'd like to move to the Firefox browser color scheme (roughly #72F259,#56CAF9,#FFEC7A,#EB6310,#FBCF38.) Other than those (and I'm flexible there) I'm open to just about anything that feels more cheerful. If you'd like to contribute a stylesheet, post a mock-up or a link to the sheet at the comments here. Thanks in advance :-)
Posted by asa at August 8, 2004 07:29 PMI found this sweet Firefox blog template over at http://tinyurl.com/5hhxy . It's built for Blogger so would need some tweaking but the css seems to be standards compliant (checked at w3c.org), and it looks really cool :).
Posted by: Phill Bryant on August 9, 2004 12:48 AMSome futile attempts of my own
Posted by: Daniel Wang on August 9, 2004 03:25 PMI vote for Daniel's second style. Oh, are we supposed to vote? Oh well.
Here's mine http://adot.gorgias.de/
I'm not a web designer but it is fun to play around with css. I read this blog almost daily so why not try to make it as pleasant as possible :)
The first one of Daniel's is good. ;-)
Posted by: minghong on August 9, 2004 05:59 PMMy take on it (this is a stylesheet only, I could do more, but I'm on my laptop and don't have access to photoshop):
A few comments:
* I always read this blog via RSS, so it took me a while to figure out what firefox you were talking about. I had never seen your front page.
* I'm a sucker for CSS-only site redesigns. This was done in about three hours using only firefox and the edit-styles bookmarklet. The linked pages have nothing changed but the location of the stylesheet. You can test this out by using edit-styles, deleting the contents, and pasting the contents of the above stylesheet, this also lets you check other pages that I didn't copy.
* You could get the navigation in the archives to work if you always had three anchor elements and used the stylesheet to set them at a fixed width (e.g. 250px).
* The all archives link doesn't work, it has an exteraneous DIV#content2, which screws everything up. I could hack around it in my stylesheet, but it's not worth it.
* This stylesheet cheats and uses -moz-border-raidus, making it invalid. These are confined to their own rules, so IE shouldn't break.(I'm on linux right now or I'd check)
* The firefox image looks washed out, you should adjust levels. Additionally, the font for "take back the web" is not vertically-stretched Arial, it's FF Meta. ;]
* I'd prefer the left gutter to go the entire way down the page. To do that with only CSS, the bar has to be above the rest of the text and floated left. If someone has a good way of doing this the way the page is currently laid out, I'd like to hear it.
* I'm looking for a job come december. If you know someone looking for a web guy, please send them my way.
Posted by: grayrest on August 9, 2004 08:37 PMcss IS addictive...
I decided to start with a clean css-file this time. Ended up like this: http://adot2.gorgias.de/
Ok this is my last one...
http://adot3.gorgias.de/
Two more added. We now have a more agile Firefox (#5) :-) We also have one for kids (does adot have any Little Dot?)
Posted by: Daniel Wang on August 10, 2004 07:23 AMI really liked grayrest's design, both main and comment pages. :-)
Posted by: Jugalator on August 10, 2004 03:00 PMPlease make text narrower. It is too wide for convienient reading.
Posted by: Burlaks on August 11, 2004 03:28 AM