Whereas the previous design was brash, over-heavy and looked bad in certain situations, hopefully this design is the antithesis of that.
What I hoped to do with this design is bring my content to the fore and improve usability but at the same time create an aesthetic that promoted a feeling of calmness and willingness to continue as well as evoking trust.
The previous design was basically trying too hard. I forgot that the primary role of a blog was not to use every CSS trick in the book and ‘force’ a design on people but rather to make it easy for users to read the content.
To that end the body text is the darkest colour on the screen, I’ve set the ‘skip’ link to be viewable at all times rather than hidden via CSS. Links are unobtrusive rather than disrupting the flow of the content and external links are all shown and grouped better rather than hiding some away.
The ‘suggest’ feature whilst a nifty trick was hardly used so I’ve dropped that – it made me uncomfortable that it invalidated the markup anyway – and behind the scenes I’ve started introducing more categories in order to make finding things easier. Lastly, I’ve also tidied up the comments and reduced them to something less hard on the eyes – I think (hope!) I’ve made better use of Gravatars this time too.
So, thats it. I still couldn’t hang on for the CSS Reboot but I’m happier with this design than I was before. For now anyway ;o)
Left Brain Right Brain 
Ooooh. Calming aesthetics. Only thing I have to say: navigation links should be bigger, like the sidebar links. Other than that, it’s looking smooth, clean and calming.
Simple and elegant, like Project New. I like the whitespace.
BTW, navigation on left? 😉
@Rob: You’re right – I’ve put the nav text up another point of an em and it does work better.
@Prabhath: I know – nav on the left! I’m such an innovator ;o)
I think you might have a slight cookie problem – the comment form was prefilled with your own details, Kev.
I _really_ like the new design – an excellent balance and colour scheme. Good job.
(you’ve misspelled ‘autistic’ in the header, by the way)
Very nice Kev, in some ways it reminds me of Jared’s “style”. If there was one thing I might change it would be some Fitt’s law applied to the top nav and possibly a rollover effect.
But yes, it’s got a real nice vibe!
Thanks for positivety all :o)
@Matthew – can’t believe I misspelt autistic! I think I’ve sorted the cookie issues now, if its still populated with my details, try ctrl+F5 and all should be as normal.
@John: I think you’re right. I’ll have a mess with that tonight.
Or now ;o) and you’re right, its better.
There’s something strangely calming about the whole thing – as well as bordering on a grrek/roman classical theme – I like it.
Wow! This is really a very soothing and calming redo.
Kudos man!
It looks great, perhaps it should be a little bit darker?
I was just getting used to the other one…. I do feel strangely calm though.
It complements Project: New very nicely now.
I’ll stick this on my list of blogs that are acceptable enough looking to read in work. The rich reds weren’t really working. My plan is to convince everyone to have an alternate stylesheet for their blog with a corporate or or simple text feel so browsing it won’t look suss.
Touching calmness, very smooth 🙂
love your design…
Yeah, Fitts’s Law fiddling is actually what I meant, but hey 😉