A Lighter Life, A Lighter Layout

I was talk­ing to Pat the oth­er day and the sub­ject of my siz­able debt came up. Debt used to trou­ble me. I did every­thing I could to stay debt-free, and was suc­cess­ful until this year. For some rea­son though, I stopped car­ing about mon­ey. “You must be real­ly hap­py”, he said, “if some­thing that big does­n’t both­er you any­more”.

It was true, but I nev­er real­ized it until then. All the good things in life have eas­i­ly out­weighed the bad. There isn’t a sin­gle thing that I can point to and explain why, but it’s hap­pened — grad­u­al­ly, pro­gres­sive­ly — over the course of the last year or so. I’ve become very com­fort­able with myself. I’m hap­py with who I am. The con­fi­dence I’ve gained, my luck in meet­ing Bronwen, the res­o­lu­tion of the sit­u­a­tion with my mom have all con­tributed I’m sure. The small things don’t both­er me any­more, and almost every­thing is a small thing. I still lose sight of the big pic­ture every now and then and get in one of my moods, but they don’t last as long as they used to.

Now a new design.

I’ve had my own site since 1996, and look­ing back on all the dif­fer­ent ver­sions (around two dozen in all) I real­ize that they’ve all been dark — less than 30% grey. I used to be a dark per­son, and the designs were a reflec­tion of this.

This new design serves two pur­pos­es. Metaphorically, the light grey (93%) rep­re­sents my feel­ing of mirth. Technically, through var­i­ous tweak­ing, I can take advan­tage of dif­fer­ent design ele­ments, such as strong (these were links in the last iter­a­tion) and empha­sis. I also want­ed to go back to the tra­di­tion­al under­lined links, with a slight hov­er flour­ish. Pixel icons have been updat­ed for extra play­ful­ness. Also added is a colophon in the About sec­tion.

Not a com­plete lay­out change — real­ly, it’s most­ly colour — but prob­a­bly the most dras­tic change I’ve ever made to the site.

And it fits per­fect­ly with how I feel.

5 comments

  1. Wow, this looks great. I was a huge fan of your pre­vi­ous style, but this is great. I almost feel like I can stretch out in here.… nice!

  2. Thanks! I find the extra space is a lit­tle much on a widescreen mon­i­tor actu­al­ly, but the cen­tered lay­out keeps it bal­anced.

  3. I real­ly love the new look! The lighter colour looks great and makes your coloured pic­tures real­ly stand out nice­ly :)

  4. Wow, sure is brighter and it’s still got that pleas­ant sleek min­i­mal­ism.

  5. @Bronwen — Thank you! I had to adjust the opac­i­ty of the pic­tures; before they were 50% when rolled out, but now they’re 70%. Something about the light back­ground made them look real­ly washed out at 50%.

    @Pearl — Minimalism…that’s the word I was look­ing for. Minimalism is much hard­er to design than I ever real­ized.

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