Redesign by Joe Lencioni

Tonight I finally put the new design for Shifting Pixel that I’ve been banging out for the past few weeks and retiring a good design that I’ve had up since May.

Why change?

While I really liked my previous design, I feel that the new one is easier to use and just makes a lot more sense when considering some of the new things that I have been doing with Shifting Pixel since the last design. I know, it’s a big departure from what I previously had, but I feel not only had I outgrown the previous design but also this is a step in the right direction. With this redesign I wanted to examine each piece of the website and figure out how to make it work better. Hopefully I have accomplished that.

What’s this design all about?

One of the biggest changes that you might notice is that I have moved from a 700 pixel wide format to 940 pixels wide. This may affect some of you, but hopefully won’t be too annoying. Hardware is improving rapidly and soon enough most people will be running 1024×768 anyway.

I paid closer attention to a number of items with this redesign than I have in the past. For instance, I wanted a good, strong, simple, structured, and meaningful logo. The rectangle of my new logo represents a photo and matches the aspect ratio of photos that my camera takes (3:2). The logo as a whole alludes to a Polaroid picture with the writing on the bottom.

I also focused a lot on the typography and vertical rhythm of the site. Without a lot of trickery, fonts on the web are pretty limited. I decided to go with Arial. While at lower sizes, I don’t really care for Arial, but at larger sizes, it actually looks kinda nice (although not quite as nice as Helvetica… sigh). For some details, I’m using Georgia… a font that is superior to Times New Roman. (Update: I am now using Calibri and Arial as a fallback.)

More in store

I’ll get back to pounding out the bugs and quirks with the new design now. There are a few sections that I still need to bring online and there are probably some issues somewhere that I didn’t catch in my beta testing. After things get running smoothly around here again, I’ll be trying to add nice little features incrementally in my spare time. And don’t worry… soon enough I’ll have a new photo up.

Finally, I’d love to hear what you think of the new design, both good and bad. Please drop me a comment.