finally some style
9th of february 2024
Finally finished the site's new style. It's nothing special, but i like it. I would have liked to do something more maximalistic, but that's a lot of work, atleast with my perfectionism. Besides the effort, when i look at maximalistic sites i get overwhelmed. Gifs or movement in general are especially distracting. I love it and if you just want to look at the visuals it's great, but it makes reading and navigating the sites very slow and difficult for me. Atleast until i am familiar enough with the site, but who tf would visit my site more than once? Since i almost only focus on text at the moment, i dont want that.
To create the graphics i used pictures, GIMP, oxipng, pnquant and gifski. It was 100% trail-and-error, because i am not creative and most of the graphics are pseudo-random noise anyway, which i like the look of, but it's also the most uncreative thing ever.
fonts
Fonts are a topic i am always afraid of somehow. I have bad taste in fonts and i feel like i know nothing about fonts and don't know any font etiquettes, if that makes sense. I just searched for a variable-width and a monospaced font that are readable, look good to me and are under a free licence. Personally i would use monospace fonts for almost all texts i deal with, but i think only few people share this preference. I decided to go with Domine as the main typeface and Courier Prime for monospaced text.
domine
My only gripe is not even the font's fault. Due to anti-aliasing the text is quite a bit darker than #ffffff, aka white. This is especially noticeable when it is next to thicker or non anti-aliased white elements. This can make the text look a bit dirty. On the other hand, it's probably a good thing. Too much contrast can be unpleasent for reading.
courier prime
It's noticeable that 14px, the current font size, is a bit too small for some glyphs and it is not perfect for code either. There is Courier Prime Code too, but i don't like it as much and i won't paste a ton of code anyway. Courier Prime is also not as tall as Domine, so they can look strange next to each other. Despite all that i want to use it.
colors
Colors complicate contrast a lot. Perception of color and color blindness suck. To keep it easy there are simply no colors. I want to be able to use color in text and graphics like in (not) Unifying the Bi & Pan Pride Flags . To have the room to play with the content colors, i want to keep the site colors to a minimum and contrast high. This way i don't need extra background boxes or something to achieve legibility.
what's next
I have ideas for a few blog posts, but i am still gathering my thoughts for them. So it could take a while until i have written them. But now that i don't have to focus on the site's visuals anymore it could be soon, or not. Besides blog posts i plan to do an rss feed, shrine, sitemap and smaller changes. Although i am not motivated to do these things right now. And the sitemap for example will only be usefull when there are more things on the site.