New Visual Design For My Blog

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As a user experience designer, the visual design of content I produce is an important consideration. Therefore, I had to create a new visual design for my blog because the default was a bit dull for my tastes, and I felt that it didn't represent me as a designer very well. I had a few simple goals in mind for the new design, and they included the following...

  • The design had to be visually distinct
  • The design had to use strong colors
  • The content in the UI had to remain readable
  • The individual sections of the UI had to remain visually distinct
  • I wanted to play with the book metaphor
  • The design had to be implementable through use of CSS modifications

After producing a mockup for a redesign of my blog in PhotoShop, I began to explore how to modify the CSS for the UI (user interface). I checked out the source for one of the pages and was quickly able to access the CSS information I needed and, low and behold, the blog also had tools that would allow me to easily customize the CSS and apply it to the UI. At this point I was pretty much good to go, except for the fact that I hadn't redesigned a site through CSS modifications alone in years. 

In order to get inspired and ready to dig into the CSS, I took a quick peak at the cool stuff that people were doing at CSS Zen Garden. Then, I dove into modifying the CSS, and after many hours of twiddling I was finally able to get the UI to look like I had designed it to look. Now my blog has a visual design I'm happy with! Yay!

Here's a before image of the blog template I modified (it's amazing what you can do with CSS and a few images)...

Screen shot

I'm compelled to include some Silverlight 2 information in this post, so here are a few interesting tidbits I've found recently that I'd like to share...

  • This is an interesting post by Matt Berseth on sorting and filtering content in the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 DataGrid control
  • This is another interesting post for the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 DataGrid control. In this post you learn how to do CRUD operations using Linq to SQL and WCF from the Swiss MSDN team