One of Edward Tufte‘s mantras is “Zero out the interface,” and I took that to heart when I “redesigned” this site by removing everything extraneous—header imagery, lines, categories, a few widgets, inline green links—and added lots of whitespace. I’m not a designer, but I love clean, simple, and uncluttered page layouts, so this new look feels better to me. I’ll probably continue to tweak as I go. Let me know if anything seems broken. Curious WordPress nerds, I’ve uploaded the code that runs this site to GitHub.
16 Comments
trevorbramble.com/
I LOVE IT.
Kalleguld
Nice design, love the uncluttered look. But some of the stories have a very small heading, making them look like they are just subheadings of the previous story.
So remove the extraneous “this_story_is_not_important”-bit 🙂
Michael Doornbos
Terrific! I’m going to follow suit!
johnr99a
Beautiful design Gina. I want to do something similar. Thanks for the code at GitHub.
Lola Beno
Categories . . . gone. Soooo – where do I go to get all, and only those specifically, about your todo.txt application?
Mark Brown
Looks good!
Foomandoonian
Nice. Your post date/author info style on each posts seems to be a holdover from the previous design though. It makes that meta information a little too prominent, I think.
nomaded
@Lola Beno: You can still use the site’s tags features. (Personally, I always found it confusing how WP had both categories and tags and they were separate namespaces.)
@Gina: I definitely like the clean look. Did you consider removing the borders from the sections on the right side? Or maybe just horizontal lines. Looking forward to any additional tweaks you apply.
Mike Wills
I love it!
James McCullough
I stripped down my site, as well. This looks fantastic and I think you did an awesome job, Gina!
Jimmy Blake
Not to hammer the Elegant Themes thing to death (I mentioned it on another Facebook post), but I really love the guy’s work. For anyone starting out from scratch or looking to save some time, this might be an easier way to accomplish something similar: http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/modest/
You can turn off the sliding pictures at the top with a couple clicks, and then you’ve got just about the cleanest skin you can find.
Emiliano Armellin
— = +
beautiful 🙂
Rickard Hillebrink
The new design is great, I only wish more sites would do the same. Great job!
Robert Bigelow
This looks *much* better, Gina! I use Apache’s .htaccess, embedded CSS and preformat tags to create the look on my own home page at http://rbigelo.sdf.org/
Simon Blackley
Clean is good, but legible is better. The typeface you chose makes reading on-screen painfully hard.
Robert Bigelow
Oh, well. So much for “.htaccess” Apache hiccuped and .htaccess won’t display my home directory any longer. I had to work up a simple “index.html” so classmates and friends can access my public files and data. http://rbigelo.sdf.org/ I’ll make it W3 XHTML 1.0 compliant when I get home.