★ Louder Than Ten ★

Realign your own eff’n life

Sep1109:36

Let’s talk about this site a bit.

I have been looking at executing a major realign for over six months. It’s not that I hated the old site or anything but felt that it no longer represented me or my skills as a designer. A sudden career change was the perfect excuse for me to make the leap. I am still very proud of the last version. I built it on Ruby on Rails with it’s own custom content management system, it used valid xhtml strict and css markup to form the front end and had a great look that truly represented my personality.

So what’s improved in this version?

Propaganda Well I have given up on building my own cms and opted to go with Expression Engine, an incredible off-the-shelf framework to help manage content. This package is sick. I’ve never had the pleasure of working with such a clean, easy-to-use, and powerful system. Since playing with it on this site, I have also used it for my last client project, The Flower Group.

I have also moved from Site 5 as my web host to the wonderful (mt) Media Temple. While I still love Site 5 (I still use them for my other projects), I want to separate this site from my others and decided to give (mt) a try after hearing so many positive reviews. I must say that the extra cost is well worth it. The experience has been stellar so far.

The design is also much tighter. I spent a lot of time making sure things aligned to a grid and baseline and made use of proper typography. I have also added a slew of nice features to improve interactivity with more dynamic content throughout.

For those spec geeks, the interface uses the following to complete the design:

A 24 column grid
12px/18px baseline
hand-coded strict 1.0 xhtml and css
Helvetica Neue for the body font
Futura STD rendered with sIFR for the headlines
Microformats where possible
Mint to track the stats
The colors are from an old soviet propaganda poster and include:
- #F7F7ED for the background
- #211F20 for the text color
- #DE4324 for the red highlights
- #A49983 for light grey highlights

The design is inspired by classic newspaper layout mixed with a little cold war propaganda. The upcoming visual components I am building with some sick Go Media vectors should help reinforce this look quite nicely.