I’ve been wanting to redesign my sites for a long time, but the idea of tinkering with CSS does not appeal to me. I’m competent enough with front-end code, but the whole cross-browser compatibility thing is such a headache. I already have enough to do debugging server-side code. By the time I get around to working on the client-side, I want as little resistance as possible.<\/p>\n
Given my whole move to frameworks, I decided to try out a CSS framework, namely Blueprint<\/a>. It was a paradigm shift for which I wasn’t quite ready. I made the mistake of trying to use Blueprint to recreate an existing design. The final product looked … odd. Rather, my eyes were so accustomed to how it has<\/em> looked that I didn’t see how else it could<\/em> look.<\/p>\n I abandoned the idea and moved onto other projects.<\/p>\n When my sister asked me to build a web site for the daycare her son attends, I decided to use Blueprint rather than figure out all the minute details of the design myself. I whipped up something fairly decent in a couple of hours, and I was impressed — Blueprint, like any good framework, sped up development time.<\/p>\n So I gave Blueprint another shot, this time in creating entirely new looks for my sites. I’ve spent the past two weeks moving everything to Blueprint. A few sites — including this one — did not undergo any redesign, but Blueprint does a nice job of cleaning up the layout. I did, however, make some very major changes to the Musicwhore.org<\/a> family<\/a> of sites<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perhaps the most drastic redesign is the personal domain<\/a>. Gone is the drab gray box, replaced with an actual color palette and a three-column layout. Hell, I even included a picture of myself.<\/p>\n (Speaking of color palettes, the Color Schemer<\/a> desktop application rocks my world. When I’m less broke, I’m buying a license. In a pinch, I can always the Color Schemer Online<\/a>.)<\/p>\n I’ve even gone so far as to incorporate white backgrounds into the sites. I dislike white backgrounds. They hurt my eyes. The majority of my sites — including this one — use dark backgrounds, but I think I use white backgrounds in the new designs sparingly enough to mitigate any discomfort.<\/p>\n I have to say, working with the grid layout has always been the one thing I missed about print page design. Back in my student newspaper editor days, I would be calculating points and picas, worrying about gutters and white space and text flow. The grid offered by Blueprint lets me space elements in a way that’s consistent. I don’t think I achieved that with my non-grid layouts.<\/p>\n Now I just have to use more semantic HTML, and I think my skill set will finally be up to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I gave Blueprint another shot, this time in creating entirely new looks for my sites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technophilia-professional"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkjq-3V","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}