New Smalltransport Design
You know you are a design geek when designing a web site is your idea of a good time. As I have said before MAYA, where I have worked over the past year, is not a web design practice so I continue to find web design stimulating and am able to apply a broadened Design experience to the web. Not filling my days with web design allows me to find creative release in it and to have fun with freelance work.
I recently revisited some archived directories to find that since November 2003, smalltransport has had roughly 6 interface designs (the first of which was done is Flash) making the one you see now the 7th. What can I say? I love visual design and have used this very site as a playground for nearly 3 years. Surely you can relate to the constant need for change and improvement. If this site served more of a professional than personal role I would of course be limited to stay within a tighter visual brand language but alas smalltransport is a creative free-for-all.
So, let’s talk about what I changed and let you in on some of my thinking around why. First off, I widened the site to closer to 1024px. My reasons for this are one, more content can be presented higher up on the page and two, the few resources I checked reported 1024px x 768px to be the resolution of choice by a long shot, next to 1280px x 1024px. I no longer feel the need to adhere to ye olde 800px x 600px design size.
The second important change is the integration of more imagery into the design. The past couple of iterations of this site have had more of an emphasis on typography than photography or graphic design. For this version I opted to warm up and add interest to the pages with a collection of photos and graphic design pieces I have laying around. The images are random on each page with the exception of the about section. On the technical side I used Dan Benjamin’s rotator script to achieve the random image effect.
Starting with this very entry, I intend to be much more consistent with posting actual articles here so I was sure to place the Articles RSS and Daily Bits RSS links in a more prevalent location to encourage visitor’s adding them to their daily read. If you have yet to get into the wonderful world or RSS feed reading to stay current with your favorite writers and sites give Newshutch a shot as it is probably one of the best web-based RSS readers I have come across.
I have wanted to add a feed of my favorite records or what I am currently listening to for some time and have finally gotten around to doing it. You will now find a list of records in the right column of each page linking to my very own Amazon associates account where they can be purchased. I simply could not get through a day without music and find that it is so important and influential to what I work on so I am sharing the love. The lovely and talented Mr. Jon Hicks gave me insight into how he integrated albums on his site with textpattern and an Amazon affiliate account – thank you sir and do email me if you would like the same information on how to do it. I am curious to see if visitors actually buy anything and will let you all know after a month of linking them.
The Design Links page has been one of the most frequented on this site for some time so I put some thought into how to best build its interface. As of today, I have tweaked and integrated some effects from the moo.fx library to make the page a bit more manageable in terms of information overload to the user and am quite pleased with the results. Building it was quite simple really and though I am weary of overusing such effects in my web interface designs I thought this page was was a good opportunity to give it a shot.
Great work buddy. Much better than the previous version – clean and elegant. Two thumbs up :)
Wolfgang Bartelme
The layout’s a little buggy in IE and there’s some horizontal scrolling for 1024 users, but it still looks very nice :D
Joshua Lane
Hey, I was a big fan of the last design but I have to say that this is quite a refreshing change. Nice work!
Ben Bishop