Posts tagged with "website"

Version 13

The design of the site was updat­ed a few weeks ago, bring­ing the lat­est incar­na­tion of equivocality.com to ver­sion 13. I thought ver­sion 12 was going to be the final design, but I’ve real­ized that things inevitably change in my life, and the site is always ends up being a reflec­tion of those changes. At least it last­ed over a year, which is more than I can say for any of my pre­vi­ous designs.

Clean and clear and under control

After going through a peri­od where I felt shat­tered and began to ques­tion every­thing that was impor­tant to me, I knew I had to rede­fine myself. It made me want to strip every­thing down, and go back to my ultra-min­i­mal­ist roots, while bor­row­ing a few much-loved ele­ments from pre­vi­ous designs such as fine dot­ted lines. All the code has been built from the ground up instead of being based on a pre­vi­ous theme.

Now there’s only one col­umn, with every­thing cen­tered to keep it all nice and sim­ple. This lets me post very large pic­tures, which I’ve real­ly been enjoy­ing late­ly, and some­thing the pre­vi­ous theme had restrict­ed me from doing. The pic­tures scale nice­ly though, so peo­ple with low-res­o­lu­tion mon­i­tors will still be able to see an entire pho­to with­out ever hav­ing to scroll.

Typography

One of the biggest changes from any of my pre­vi­ous designs is the use of a non-sys­tem font for body copy. I want­ed to move away from the Helvetica I’ve been using for so long now and give the site a unique feel. I decid­ed on Proxima Nova, which retains human­is­tic pro­por­tions with a some­what geo­met­ric appear­ance. I’m still frus­trat­ing­ly dis­ap­point­ed by the cur­rent state of web typog­ra­phy, so I’ve turned to Typekit to take care of that for me.

Version 12

Version 12 has been retired here.

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.

Continue read­ing “Version 12”…

  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. [↩]

Version 11

Version 11 has been retired here.

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.

Continue read­ing “Version 11”…

More Stolen Words and Pictures

Most recent­ly, a per­son called Cleo, who also goes by the mis­nomer “sexy1980”, stole both words and pic­tures from a heart­felt entry I wrote after a par­tic­u­lar­ly hard day. Word-for-word. You see that car on her site? That’s my car.

Cleo steals

If you dare to look at this abor­tion of a web page, do so at your own risk. I warn you, the ani­ma­tions and colours are not for the feint of heart.

I was­n’t hap­py when some­one start­ed copy­ing entire entries of mine, word-for-word, or when anoth­er per­son stole my design of Version 10 (his attempt­ed redesign in an effort to cov­er up his actions isn’t that far off either). Sure, I also get peo­ple hotlink­ing my images too, but I take sim­ple plea­sure in replac­ing the images with pic­tures of a lemon par­ty, because I get to laugh at things like this.

But when some­one steals both my words and hotlinks my pic­tures I get real­ly pissed off.

Design Robbery

After my Perishable Press inter­view, and hav­ing Version 10 fea­tured in a Crestock arti­cle titled “13 Minimalist Designs You Really Should See”, this site has seen a surge in design-relat­ed traf­fic. But increased expo­sure is a dou­ble-edged sword. Higher pro­file sites make you a big­ger tar­get for secu­ri­ty issues, spam, and design rob­bery.

Such as the case with eric-akmal.com.

Does this look famil­iar?

Eric Akmal Dot Com top

Eric Akmal Dot Com bottom

Continue read­ing “Design Robbery”…