I’ve been working on a redesign of this site for a while now. Now, there’s still quite a bit of work to be done, but this is oven fresh. Inspired by Frank’s redesign blog, I thought it might be interesting to document this process.

A small history

This domain has been in my possession for over a decade. Over the years, it has been my primary presence on the Internet serving whatever I need it to do at that time. It started life as a portfolio for my grad school applications, became a blog for a bit, then back to a portfolio site, and a few more such pendulum swings in between.

What is a personal site that does not get redesigned? There has been constant and multiple ones, many of them not even surviving pass the concepting stage. Furthermore, none of them have been very good about resolving the tension between wanting to have a grid-based visual layout versus one that focuses one chronological textual content.

This site was also started as an artisanal hand crafted html site, moved to Wordpress at some point, and is now being generated using Jekyll and hosted on AWS.

What we’re doing here

This redesign was inspired by print layouts and newspapers. The previous redesign adopted a rigid CSS framework (of my own making no less) that really wanted a 1024px-based 16 column layout. That has gone away now, with my realization was that the layout does not have to be constrained to a fixed width grid, but can flow according to the shape of it’s container. This allows the content to make more use of the space, to breathe, and the visual elements to recede and disappear.

I have carried the visual design forward from the previous design. I wanted it to be visually interesting yet simple in it’s execution and thus some of the superfluous elements from the previous iteration have been filed down. Hopefully with the luxury of time and the accumulation of experience, I am able to achieve a new level of polish and refinement.

Ultimately, the goal here is to have my place on the Internet. I’ve been thinking a lot about design, thinking a lot about technology and working and playing on ideas new and old, and I’d like for them to find their home here. The memory can be fallible.

There will be more to be said for this redesign but for now, let’s say, work in progress.