Redesign
It finally happened, obviously. I don’t know if I’m 100% happy with it or not, but I think it’s growing on me.
Something I’ve noticed - once I dove into CSS and standards compliance, it’s gotten nearly impossible to prototype a new site look entirely in photoshop. I know a lot of folks who still do it that way, but I’ve found it’s easier just to dive in and start yanking the css file around rather than come up with an image protype that I may or may not be able to produce with the code.
These days, the process goes something like this:
- I decide I’m tired with the current color scheme.
- I use photoshop or Tim Luoma’s color chart to find a base color I want to try out. This time, obviously, it was blue.
- I do a global search and replace to pop in the new hex value - this will normally take care of the color values for all the different header text. (It should be noted that I almost never play around with the color for body text or body background, and that my default combo of verdana/georgia hasn’t failed me yet.)
- Assuming the new color actually works, I use photoshop to work out complementary values that I use for the sidebar, callout blocks, and other colorful bits.
- I play around with element positioning and decoration if necessary. (Links now have a custom image for underlines - don’t know if I’ll keep it or not.)
- Lastly, I start playing with graphics. Until this last redesign, I only hooked background images into the existing bits of code - but on this last go ’round I added a few extra placeholder divs so I could pop a few more images than I was able to use before. (Though I do hope that someday I’ll be able to hook multiple background files onto a single element and avoid the minor cruft I have to use to get this effect right now.)