2 February 2017:
Sometimes, bigger is better.
What a misleading, click-bait style title.I’ve had my blog for a few years now, and over the years I’ve made quite a few changes to its design. I remember one of my older themes was hideously light blue (simply because I liked it back then; bad design choice).
The current theme, which I created from scratch, has lasted since 2013. It is bland, simply because beautifully designed themes must have either (1) lots of good graphics or (2) solid coding, or both.
I have neither, so I simply did up a very minimalist design. This theme of mine, I call it red wax (simply because #C00000 looked like the colour), is in its third version. The last major significant change was removing links to the archives.
This was done back then, during a time where I was pretty low and insecure, and those against me could’ve browsed through my archives for any, more personal material. So I removed it.
That time is over now, thankfully. But I am still hesitant on whether to restore that feature, and if so, where to put it (i.e. by the side or at the bottom). I’ve also limited the number of recent posts from 3 to 1.
In a way, it means that if you miss a post, you can never read it once it gets taken over by a more recent one. (Step exclusive siah.) Back to the topic, this time I did two main changes: improved my masthead and increased the overall size.
Now, my masthead looks somewhat like a signboard, using positive / negative space, and looks more bold. Pretty proud to have done it using pure CSS, when I could’ve taken the easy way out and used a picture instead.
(Especially considering my very rusty coding skills by now.) The good thing about not using a picture is that, as long as the browser works properly and the code is correct, the text should appear as it is.
If it was a picture, I would have to depend on a server that I host it on. I have been using Photobucket, but I don’t want to be over reliant on it, especially since my blog has very little other photos anyway.
I did a little bit of cheating with the code, taking sort-of an easy way out with a little trick. But, as with easy ways out, they don’t always work. I tried it in other variations and in some cases it failed. So for now, I’ll just stick to this.
Next, about my blog’s width. As I mentioned above, when I created red wax, I wanted it to be very minimalist. It was a one-column layout, except for the ‘sidebar’ that was at the bottom with two columns.
Since it was one-column, I set a rather small width of 480px. That is really narrow, if you were to compare other blogs. I think their main column would be at least 640 or even 720px.
Actually, another reason why I initially used 480px was that, in posts where I included pictures, 480px would be just nice. Most pictures would have a width larger than that, and I could scale it to fit exactly.
If I used a larger width, I may have to scale up (which I don’t want to) or the picture would have awkward left-right margins. Hence, my earlier posts’ images were all set to width: 480px;.
However, as you will realise if you are reading this, I just increased the width. Now, it is 640px, a 4/3 increase. I have also increased all font sizes proportionally (which gave my slightly weird font sizes). Why?
I don’t remember who or when, but I know that someone once told me my main font was too small. Indeed, at 10pt, it is smaller than the default body text in Microsoft Word.
At that size (and a width of 480px), somehow most of my paragraphs are three lines’ long. I don’t strictly meet that rule, but somehow to me it just looks neat. However, it also ends up looking too bunched up.
I don’t think it caused much problems with reading, but bigger definitely would be better. Hence, I made the increase. And to try to maintain the three-line paragraph, the fonts also increased proportionally.
Back to my concerns about images. I realise that since I almost never use images, it wasn’t worth it to let those hinder the width. Also, it’s 2017; I think by now images with width ≥640px shouldn’t be that rare.
So, there’s that. Hopefully you, the reader, would be more pleased with this ‘new look’, certainly seems more spacious to me now. In retrospect, I’m glad I chose PT Serif as the body font; seems like many other websites are using it now.
And hopefully this current version of red wax will last for another three years, or until I decide to shut my blog for good. Or at most, just minor improvements along the way; I can’t see myself doing an overhaul anytime soon.
TTFN.
P.S. In a further bid to increase readability, I also increased line-height for all post titles and content to 150%. For Chrome (which I use), the default is 120%. So it should look even more spacious now.