equivocality.com is now run­ning ver­sion 12, in what I sus­pect will be the final design iter­a­tion for this site¹.

The gem cannot be polished without friction

I’ve been itch­ing for a new look for a while now, around the time I was in England, some­thing that was reflec­tive of the peace I’ve made with myself and the world.

Life no longer feels like a draft where I’m try­ing to fig­ure things out, so I’ve aban­doned the beloved graph paper back­ground which debuted in ver­sion 9. Most ele­ments and text have been toned down a bit² to give things a slick, clean, and pol­ished look, very much inspired by Jin Yang’s blog. I’m still in love with the large single-column lay­out that lets me post big pic­tures and videos, and most of the design is still based around that.

I’ve never been a fan of ver­ti­cal rules — they always seem to claus­tro­pho­bi­cally trap con­tent more than any­thing else — but I found they brought much-needed def­i­n­i­tion to the wide col­umn, now that the graph paper is no longer there. Other ele­ments are strong enough on their own to define the under­ly­ing grid. I’ve also added some gravity-defying page cor­ners to bring a bit of depth to the layout.

Even though Version 12 has been based sig­nif­i­cantly on my Version 11 code and design, I decided to give it a major revi­sion num­ber because it’s a new theme at heart. They may look sim­i­lar, but they feel very different.

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1. For a very long time at least [↑]
2. I’ve real­ized that you don’t need retina-burning con­trast to give some­thing strong def­i­n­i­tion. [↑]

equivocality.com is now run­ning ver­sion 11. For a per­son who was noto­ri­ous for the fre­quency of his design changes, ver­sion 10 stuck around for a very long time — mea­sured in years, not months.

To everything, there is a season

I’m going through a sig­nif­i­cant shift in atti­tude right now. For the first time in so long, I feel sta­ble and com­plete, and I wanted my site to reflect this change. I’ve also been let­ting go of many things, and this cer­tainly gave me the moti­va­tion to update even though I adored the pre­vi­ous version.

I found lots of inspi­ra­tion in Jin’s recent refresh, which has an extremely smooth and slick feel to it. The ironic thing is that he wanted it to be clean and pol­ished, and told me he looked to ver­sion 10 of equivocality.com for ideas. Here I am get­ting ideas from his ideas from my ideas, in a won­der­ful cre­ative syn­ergy, and I think we’re both very happy with our mutual results.

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