Michele’s Freeminding

After a few months with a kind of anonymous design - don’t get me wrong, I liked it, but I think it was impersonal -, last week I started working on a new design aimed at being a long lasting one.
And finally, here it is Monk!

What’s new?

First of all, it has been developed in a new way. I used to design websites quickly, without caring about subtle details. Instead, this time I put a lot of effort in refining it.

At first sight, you should be able to see a new color scheme. I wanted to keep going with orange, but after I started to work with that reddish color - how’s it called in English? - I soon loved it.
The hues of red, green and pink have all been taken from the header image to keep the design consistent throughout the whole page.

I revamped the archive page, too, and I know use Shawn Grimes’s Clean Archives plugin.

The matter with fonts

I also put a lot of time testing new fonts and choosing those that are more widely available.
Unfortunately, you may not have my first-choice fonts, but you should still be able to see it well because I specified other more common fonts, too.

To see the website as I intended it, you should have Century Gothic for the headers and Gill Sans (or Geneva) for the rest of the page. Also, it’s better viewed if your browser is set with a 16px default font size.
I chose Gill Sans because I think it’s the most readable sans-serif font even at small sizes.

The header

The image in the header, is one of the many I took in Sera Monastery near Lhasa, Tibet.
I chose it because I think it’s powerful and relaxing at the same time: I think it’s very intense.

Choosing an image for the header is also a way to make a design more versatile and increase the chances to keep it for a longer time. Why? Because should I start to be bored by it, I’d simply need to change header image to freshen it up…don’t you think so?

What’s next?

After spending a lot of time redesigning my blog, I now feel like I should put a lot of effort in “redesigning” the content. So I’ll try to improve the quality of my posts, both from a content point of view as from an English point of view.

Hopefully, there won’t be any new redesign for a long time now. Maybe only little enhancements here and there.
But I’d like to know what you, my loyal readers, think about this. Is it better or worse than the other? Does it accomplish its work well? Is there something you think I should improve/change?

This post was written 3 years, 3 months ago on May 11th, 2005 late afternoon.