Things to come

06 Nov 2005

About to launch a new site. Exciting. This is the first site I’ve fully designed in a graphics app (namely Inkscape — yes, a vector graphics app! Worked really well!) before introducing CSS: I dropped the idea of “CSS-based design” for a while and think it turned out quite nicely. The project was gratis for an open-source project mentioned before on this site, encompassing logo and site design. This is the “more visually complex” design I alluded to two days ago. It mightn’t seem particularly dark if you have a large screen, but the content area is certainly less bright. It doesn’t have a ‘dark’ feel, though — quite the opposite.

The design is about primary colours, which represent the purpose of the project itself. From that you might have guessed what I’m talking about, but I’ll continue to be dramatic until I’m ready to say “hey, it’s launched, go look.” Well, actually, it won’t be “launched” until early December in a marketing sense, but the site will be ‘live’ sometime in the next 48 hours, albeit with some content missing.

I hope my usual standards of markup propriety have been upheld — I even bothered to validate this one before launch, catching two potentially embarrassing unencoded ampersands (because I completely forgot we’re meant to do that. I haven’t used them for so long, but the typeface has nice ampersands so I wanted to!) — but most of all, at least for me, this design is about design. I say without hesitation it’s the best I’ve ever come up with.

I’m hoping to enjoy working with Inkscape as a design tool more in the future, because it really is excellent! Expect an announcement about the site’s launch in the next 24 hours — until then, feel free to try and guess what it is! ;-)