On evolutionary design

I think this is true of most of us but I’m never really happy with the design of my own site, probably because I have so much freedom with it and so little time for it!

Instead of ‘finishing’ the previous design, I took the decision several weeks ago to simply push it to what I felt was the next natural, evolutionary, step. I’ve finally come to the realisation that it will never be ‘finished’ because I am always discovering some new technique and working that into workflow.

Recently, it's been the largely invisible stuff that has prompted me to re-design (again) and as a result there have been far more changes under the hood than on the surface of this latest iteration. Because I typically enjoy the luxury of creating new client sites from scratch, I often find myself building sites for clients that are far better than my own. This is, of course, also because I have far more time to work on client sites than my own.

I don’t feel I am alone in this regard.

Eating my own dogfood 🔗

The biggest changes I’ve made to my own workflow recently are those relating to semantic markup. I’ve now completely dropped the use of what I previously thought of as ‘helper classes’ like .clearfix and .floatright and I have long since realised the folly of using stylistic class names like .btn or .icon-something, but there were still a couple of these present on my own site!

I recently took some (good natured) criticism over the fact that I was criticising the use of Bootstrap’s non-semantic markup in Joomla’s core output, with the use of .btn classes on article readmore links, whilst still using similar classes in my own sites markup.

These were justified comments of course. Even though I was fully aware of the pitfalls of using such classes I should, of course, practice what I preach. I still believe that many of those calling for inclusion of such classes in core outputs simply do not understand the potential problems it can bring and I do still believe it was worth trying to highlight some of these issues.

Incremental change 🔗

There is no radical departures from the previous design of this site, it’s just become a little more refined (in my opinion). I’ve managed to cut down on page load substantially, by optimising my own markup and further cleaning up Joomla’s core outputs and refining some of my template logic. I’ve also continued to push the focus toward typography and readability rather than the more visible, artistic, elements of ‘design’.

I’m still not happy of course, but if I waited until I was this site would never be updated! Next on my list is finding a lovely, readable serif with great discretionary ligatures that I can use for headings and creating a clean call-to-action. I’m also thinking of throwing some texture down onto the footer to give it a little more depth.

As always I welcome any sensible comments, and I’d love to know what you think. Thanks for reading.