After much thought over the past few weeks I’ve come to the real­iza­tion that I’m not sat­is­fied with the design of this site. I sup­pose my afore­men­tioned Des­ig­nat­i­tus has kicked in once again and the designer in me has decided to do a com­plete over­haul of this site, including:

1. Code from scratch instead of rely­ing on Mov­able Type tem­plates as a basis to the design. Granted, using tem­plates to build from is fine but it’s like mak­ing a cake from fresh ingre­di­ents — in the end it just tastes better.

2. Restruc­ture the lay­out. Rely less on try­ing to emu­late other designs and instead cre­ate some­thing of my own. I’m an artist and intepre­ta­tion of design is immi­nent, but hav­ing some­thing that feels like your own is gen­er­ally more satisfying.

3. Uti­liz­ing more MT code, I would like to have some­thing more robust and fea­ture rich. Focus­ing my inten­tions on build­ing this site to be much more than a blog.

4. Com­press the cat­e­gories into 4 or 5 cat­e­gories instead of the num­ber that exists now. I’d much rather focus my atten­tion and writ­ing on a few choice top­ics instead of try­ing to cover every­thing that comes to mind or things that I’ve found on the Inter­net. Sites like boing​bo​ing​.net are doing this already and I don’t want to rein­vent the wheel. This site was cre­ated for much more than trivia and moreso to show­case my design work and research.

I’d expect this will take me any­where from 2 weeks to a span of a few months con­sid­er­ing I don’t wish to rush this redesign. I’d much rather do my research mak­ing the end result more appeal­ing to the point where I can focus on writ­ing, instead of con­stantly re-designing this site.

Adam Polselli, of http://​www​.adampolselli​.com writes;

One of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of design­ing is tak­ing that first step: when you know what style you would like to achieve, but you just don’t know where to start. We’ve all been there at one time or another, think­ing to our­selves “what col­ors should I use?”, “what fonts would work best?”, and “what are some ele­ments of the style I want?”

This hap­pens more often than I would like. Espe­cially when it comes to design­ing some­thing for my own use, which due to my per­fec­tion­ist out­look, results in out­put that grows stale quickly. Design­ing for some­one else seems to, for me any­ways, come more nat­ural and ulti­mately means I’ll be more pas­sion­ate about the sub­ject mat­ter in the long run. I some­times refer to this as “des­ig­nat­i­tus”, dis­ease of the designer.

Thank­fully, Adam Polselli real­izes this exists and has gra­ciously donated his design guides, spec sheets to pro­vide inspi­ra­tion. He calls them “Get the Look”:http://www.adampolselli.com/getthelook guides and each con­tains a help­ful sec­tion on font, color and lay­out options. My favorite for the moment is “Vintage”:http://www.adampolselli.com/getthelook/vintage.php , which exudes a 60s-ish flavor.

If you’re suf­fer­ing from “des­ig­nat­i­tus” uti­lize these sheets for inspi­ra­tion. You might shake your­self from this dis­ease and cre­ate some­thing that you’ll enjoy for a life­time. Or, you might not. Who really knows.