I’m back. Finally.
So, a little about the design—I decided quite early I wanted to stick to a solid grid foundation. The website is built around four columns, each columns measuring 200 pixels with 25-pixel wide gutters. To ensure content doesn’t sit beside browser window borders I’ve also installed 40-pixel wide left and right hand margins giving a total width of 955 pixels.
I opted for a simple layout that was to be decorated by the content using beautiful typography. Type is set in Georgia and Helvetica with Times New Roman and Verdana as respective fall-backs. For those who run Mac OS X or have Minion Pro or Adobe Caslon Pro in their font libraries will also see the more stylish ampersands (i.e. Jack & Jill…), thanks to wp-typogrify.
wp-typogrify is a brilliant WordPress plugin that parses text replacing primes with proper quotation marks and apostrophes, transforms dashes and minus characters into proper en and em dashes, with thin spaces or without, and more! It is a port of the original typogrify—a set templates for Django by Christian Metts. PHP and Perl scripts also exist—just call the function when parsing text.
There are a few issues with Internet Explorer I still need to iron out—currently the navigation bar is displaced a page-width to the right and some of the selectors aren’t being recognised. On a separate note, I will also be adding a portfolio in the coming month.
The CSS and XHTML is fully valid about to be fully valid—gimme five minutes. Other than that, there’s not much more to say, it’s just really nice to be back.
8 comments
It’s nice to have you back. Are you going to have a personal ‘blog as well?
@Ash: This will remain as my personal ‘blog.
Good on ya, mate !
Welcome back Pascal. I’m a *really* big fan of this design. Love it. Did you implement WP all by yourself?
@Tate: Yep & thanks.
Hey Pascal, regularly checked back to your blog in anticipation of the new design.
You’ve got a great eye for layout. The inset bullet points work really well. Great job.
@Alex Biddle: thanks mate. When are you next popping onto Skype?
@Pascal: I’ll have another look at Skype, I’m in halls at the moment, so I’ll have to get my microphone sent up.
I’ll send you an email when I get it working, eventually.