Back in the last week of 2015, I got some time to finally sit down on the redesign of this blog, and the site. At that point in time, I wanted a dark theme. Something grey, black, and white - only less of white/light grey. That’s what I had planned. But, they do say that plans have a way of making their own plans. This couldn’t be more true w.r.t the current design, and the style book that came to be. I did take my own time, trying to get the look, and feel which I thought wo uld be just right; Too much time, if I may.
The Dark Themed Design
New-old dark theme for the indefiniteloop blog
At one point in time, the dark themed design looked great. Felt great. Everyone who saw it take shape, said that it looked great. But somewhere along the way, I started to feel like something was amiss; something kept feeling off with the whole blog.
Around this time, I had already finished much of the integration, of this dark theme, with Jekyll. I took some time off from looking, and working at it daily. Only coming back to it after about 3 days. It was then that it struck me - this dark themed design that I had created was too…cluttered; it was too filled up. It wasn’t as minimalistic as I thought it was. It turned out to be too busy looking. That’s when I had to scratch that entire theme, and start back at square one.
Now, this was already the second week of January 2016. I was feeling let down, by the fact that I had put in so much of my time into a redesign that wasn’t working for me. Something that was the complete opposite of what I had envisioned. Starting the design process again felt like a daunting task, if nothing else. I knew that I wanted to keep the colour scheme the same as the previous one - blacks, greys, and white. But, at the same time I wanted to make sure that the new re-do would not come across as busy, or suffocating. Looking at the dark themed design some more, I understood that the main cause of it feeling crowded was the way I used this colour scheme. Thus began some experimentation with those three-four colors, and their relative shades.
During this experimentation, I kept coming back to using more white, instead of the dark colours I wanted - that in the form of white space. I did not fight that urge, to come clean. Instead I adapted the theme to have more white space, while retaining the greys, and blacks along with some orange, and green ascents.
The result of all that work, is this new blog design. The only thing that I do have to sit on now is some slight changes to my home page, along with a few fixes to the CSS of the blog.
Style guide/book for indefiniteloop.com/blog/
I love what sojourner.co has evolved into, as indefiniteloop.com. When I look at this shiny new minimalistic design, I feel happy that I spent the time I did, going through the first design, and finally landing up on this new look and feel. It looks open, crisp, and welcoming. It’s really simple, minimal and clean.
Do let me know what you guys think of it! Would love some critique too!
