One thing I do when I’m feeling down or unmotivated, as a form of digital sock drawer organizing, is tweak the design of something, often times this blog.
The journey of this “redesign” over the course of 2–3 hours last night is so typical. I had grand designs to facelift the entire thing with something more evocative. I was inspired to go dark after spending some time on overtherhine.com (Ohio has been reissued as a double LP on vinyl and it is hard to resist the impulse buy). I dreamed of animated smoke effects. I thought about dark textures and forked a promising CodePen. I entertained the idea of going way over the top with the dot grid animation. Then I perused jekyllthemes.org for a while, finding myself always drawn to the most minimal of themes. I had been entertaining adopting the Hyde theme outright, so I gave that a shot. The results weren’t as great as I had hoped for.
I liked Uno quite a bit but decided it had too many elements I would have to figure out for it to be a practical choice for late on a Saturday night (I could see myself spending two hours on choosing the perfect background image, for example). I looked at Good Clean Read and Solo. I quite liked Sustain and White Paper.
Finally I ended up at (internet-famous) Zach Holman’s Left, which he has clearly modified quite a bit on his own site. That led me to, for about the 1,000th time, switch back to Avenir as the only font used here (if you have it on your computer). From there, after all that research, it was a seemingly obvious choice to just tweak my current implementation of Poole which I have customized quite a bit (for example).
And those tweaks, unsurprisingly, involved removing a bunch of stuff instead of adding anything. I messed around with my link styling (specifically hover effects) for a long time before just returning to the existing yellow-background-on-hover thing. I simplified the already simple menu. I removed the horizontal rules between posts on the main page and just increased the margin. I did darken the background…ever…so…slightly. :)