I hope by now you’ve realised the new drastic change to the main page of mohoyt.com and the technicolour excellence it now possesses, its even on fire!!! I have been meaning to change it for a while, ever since I temporarily adopted Wolfgang Bartelme’s ‘dark’ theme for the blog… I completely adore that theme, but I can’t exactly use someone elses theme for ever can I?
Instead I thought, lets design my own theme, again I know, but the last one was hardly a brilliant success was it? At the moment, the them which is currently being called ‘red’ is loosely based around ‘dark’ to the extent that it uses the same fonts, has the same/similar icons and has some other similar features to do with the background styling. This will probably slowly change as I drift away from ‘dark’ and ‘evolve’… The only reason that I could not hold in the current design is that I was so amazed that I pretty much created my own theme (albeit borrowed symbols) from scratch and am thus quite a bit better at CSS, the XHTML has a long way to go though! I will eventually change the rest of the blog/site to look the same way. It shouldn’t be too hard considering most of the layout and colour is already sorted with the style sheet of the ‘intro page.’ What I didn’t realise is how fun this can be.. Designing websites was always sometimes good and sometimes bad (kinda like Marmite… you either love it or you hate it!) but now that I really have a bit of time, and also some effort (it usually helps!) I am enjoying myself.
By creating your own site/stylesheet, you now realise how much effort other people put into sites and see why interface design is such a brilliant thing. Certain sites to look at include Sofa (www.madebysofa.com), which is the company that produces Disco, Versions and Checkout, all of which have excellent websites, but also the most amazing UIs on the actual apps. Check out the smoke effect on Disco! One other brilliant webpage is Pixelmator (www.pixelmator.com), and application that looks incredibly promising, pretty much a replacement to Photoshop on the Mac, and almost completely powered by CoreImage and with a sweet interface design. Its just all so amazing. Isn’t it strange how the Mac developers always have some of the best websites?
The unfortunate thing about looking at other people’s sites just after you’ve done lots of work on your own is that it can really overshadow what you’ve done. Then again, the people that make some of the aforementioned sites are probably genii. I spose I shall have to check out some of those interesting books on the art of web design using XHTML and CSS. It really is an art it seems…