Live Redesign in Progress

September 7, 2005

Con­sider this design a place­holder as its pur­pose, while tem­po­rary, is meant to replace what would oth­er­wise be an unstyled tem­plate. I don’t know about you but I’d much rather see a sparsely-styled lay­out than the bare min­i­mum, default browser style. The lat­ter can be quite the eye­sore, espe­cially if you sud­denly have blurred vision or if that tune in your head, yes that one, is pre­vent­ing you from think­ing straight.

For weeks I’ve con­tem­plated whether I’d do this redesign live or behind the scenes and while I can weigh the advan­tages of keep­ing it behind close doors, per­son­ally I’ve always enjoyed see­ing designs flour­ish live, even if live means “a span of 30 days or more.”

Since I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in CSS Reboot, I won­dered if doing the redesign live would be against the rules, but see­ing as though Nathan Smith pulled the cur­tain back early, it seems as if I’m in the clear. Regard­less, the offi­cial unviel­ing will occur some­time in Novem­ber, so I’ve got plenty of time to fid­get with things.  

28 comments

The next week was tough but i man­aged to pull together a new design that i thought was even bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous draft, so i was def­i­nitely happy that i started over. There were 2 posts that helped me out along the way. The first was called, “ Live Redesign in Progress ” by Kar­tooner and i was really impressed with his intent to redesign the site while it was still online. I think he is an excel­lent designer so i can’t wait to see what he comes up with next. It even made me con­sider sign­ing up for the next

by :: TechBlog :: on September 25, 2005 at 4:32 pm. Reply #

I’m excited to see how things develop at the ol’ Kar­tooner home­page. Love that green.

by Greg on September 7, 2005 at 2:58 pm. Reply #

Thanks Greg. We’ll see how this pans out. :)

by kartooner on September 7, 2005 at 4:09 pm. Reply #

Live redesigns are my favorite! Way to go and be brave, and skip that whole devel­op­ment server idea!

by Josh on September 7, 2005 at 4:37 pm. Reply #

Can’t wait to see this flesh out. You always inspire me with the lit­tle things that I never caught before.

by Matt Burris on September 7, 2005 at 6:25 pm. Reply #

I love the hover states man!!! Super hot.

by Mike on September 7, 2005 at 6:26 pm. Reply #

I’m anx­ious to see how this project devel­ops. I’ve been doing the same thing with fdiidesign.com, except I dropped that live redesign and moved on to my cur­rent and more appro­pri­ate fernandodunn.com.

by Fernando Dunn II on September 7, 2005 at 7:13 pm. Reply #

I’m in agree­ment with every­one else. Def­i­nitely keen to see how this fleshes out. BTW, I’m aware that the falling boul­ders is prob­a­bly tem­po­rary but I love it:)

by If Else on September 8, 2005 at 6:23 am. Reply #

One more for the home team. Can’t wait to see how it turns out.

by Yannick on September 8, 2005 at 1:25 pm. Reply #

Right now I’m won­der­ing if I should forego using a side­bar and either have the extra­ne­ous links in another sec­tion (or page) or pos­si­bly split and seper­ate those ele­ments like Phu has done.

Deci­sions. Decisions.

by kartooner on September 8, 2005 at 2:38 pm. Reply #

Thanks Yan­nick.

If for some rea­son it turns out for the worst, I’ve got a backup plan that I’ve shared with Bryan in which I sim­ply screen­cap his design (which I think rocks) and just ref­er­ence the image on here. Easy smeasy fix for what would oth­er­wise be a time-wasted headache.

Plan ‘F’ would be to blame every­thing on Paul.

by kartooner on September 8, 2005 at 3:27 pm. Reply #

Wait, when did this hap­pen? o_O;
Oh well, you could make one that’s all drawn up and stuff, like a “sketchy” ver­sion of Kar­toon­er­star. :p

by Bryan on September 8, 2005 at 6:22 pm. Reply #

Are you sure Plan F isn’t actu­ally Plan A…? :D

I’m lov­ing the new color scheme.

Con­cern­ing the extra­ne­ous links, per­son­ally, I think this lay­out looks very clean with the one col­umn. You can see a com­par­i­son at my new design that I’ve sep­a­rated my “Asides” Phu style.

by William on September 8, 2005 at 7:49 pm. Reply #

Byran: Oh, I left a mes­sage about it on your Flickr account. Some­thing about, if I were to rip your design I wouldn’t go to the trou­ble of actu­ally lift­ing the under­ly­ing code, nah, I’d just take a screen­shot and ref­er­ence the image.

William: Actu­ally I might just put those in their own sec­tion now that I think about it.

Thanks for the comments.

by kartooner on September 8, 2005 at 8:14 pm. Reply #

Got to love the draw­ing of falling boul­ders. I need skills like that damnit!

by Bryan on September 8, 2005 at 10:47 pm. Reply #

Bryan: If you dig that, you’ll like the fact that there’s more illus­tra­tions com­ing down the pipeline. I’m shoot­ing for an “Illo of the Week”, which is a fea­ture I’ve wanted for a long time now.

by kartooner on September 8, 2005 at 10:55 pm. Reply #

Great design, like it a lot! Just a thought… The falling boul­ders and the top images fixed maybe?

by Sprons on September 9, 2005 at 9:15 am. Reply #

Sprons: Good idea, thanks for the sug­ges­tion. I had intended on mak­ing the back­ground fixed but just hadn’t got­ten around to it.

by kartooner on September 9, 2005 at 9:31 am. Reply #

Hi Eric. Yeah, I’m also yearn­ing to put a “less is more” approach to my site, after real­iz­ing I’m not pre­tend­ing to sell myself as a ‘mad skillz’ CSS guru or some­thing like that any­time soon. It was fun for a while, but I pre­fer now a “back to basics” approach. I’d rather give my sketches and pho­tos more focus on a new design. I just hope to make it to the next Reboot. Congrats!

by beto on September 9, 2005 at 12:40 pm. Reply #

beto: Amongst other things, it also allows you to focus on the details. If you haven’t already, sign up for the Reboot and we both can keep tabs on one another.

by kartooner on September 9, 2005 at 5:25 pm. Reply #

Good luck on the redesign as well.

by kartooner on September 9, 2005 at 6:56 pm. Reply #

Erik, say NO to the side­bar. You wouldn’t believe how many lim­i­ta­tions it puts on your site. It brack­ets your site into a tem­plate and makes you make use of it even if a cer­tain page doesn’t need it. In my cur­rent design, I’m say­ing “Side­bar, I hate you and your family.”

Leave it out of your design. Make peo­ple read your con­tent with­out dis­trac­tions. It will com­pli­ment your writ­ing skills perfectly.

by Fernando Dunn II on September 9, 2005 at 10:03 pm. Reply #

I’ll keep in it mind. I’m really lov­ing how open-ended my site is right now, even if there’s not a whole lot going on at the moment.

If you think it’ll serve as a com­pli­ment to the writ­ing (and illus­tra­tions) them­selves, then so be it. That’s one thing I like about Aval­on­star, the fact that Bryan chose to go sans side­bar. Com­mend­able in every respect, espe­cially since hav­ing one does give it that “tem­plate” stigma.

by kartooner on September 9, 2005 at 10:24 pm. Reply #

I am sure your redesign will turn out great. Keep up the good work.

Peace and God Bless you!

by Yannick on September 12, 2005 at 1:10 pm. Reply #

Yan­nick: Thanks man. Next on this site’s rather short list of to-do’s is to work on the sub­se­quent sec­tions and fill them up with content.

by kartooner on September 12, 2005 at 1:43 pm. Reply #

I’m also excited to see how things turn out — I would def­i­nitely keep your orig­i­nal shield/crest. It’s def­i­nitely a brand that works for you.

by Donnie Jeter on September 13, 2005 at 8:48 pm. Reply #

Look­ing really good so far. Very orig­i­nal. I see the boul­ders! LOL

by trench on September 14, 2005 at 7:16 am. Reply #

This is look­ing really nice thus far Erik. I really like how you’ve styled the com­ments. The sketches of the boul­ders are a great touch as well. Keep it up!

by Shawn Grimes on September 14, 2005 at 2:34 pm. Reply #

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