Been having the itch since the beginning of the year to make some changes to my year-old site design. So I worked on it on-and-off for several days, and launched it last week. In addition to some small clean-up, I’ve changed some fonts and colors. I’d barely want to call it a “redesign” at all, but there are some fun details I want to note.

Colors were the biggest deal for me. I was so done with the white over deep navy, and the radioactive green — it started to grate on me. So I sought a more neutral and calming palette. I still liked the letterpress feel, so I picked a cream color that could be like paper. And all of the type now has a subtle bevel.

The next obvious change are fonts. Picking new type probably took the most time. I didn’t change the logotype, because I still like Audimat in the block cut-sort of effect. But, I didn’t like Audimat for the headers as I was using it before. So I replaced them with the rather popular Kaffeesatz, by Yanone — an eminently readable sans-serif typeface with a whimsical kind of handwritten feeling. I picked it mostly because, outside of being beautifully treated by Yanone, it’s rather condensed, and I love its relatively large x-height. I’ve got a thing for big x-heights.

X-height and whimsy also led me to my choice of body font: a serif face by Oriol Esparraguera called Afta Serif. I was drawn to its visual rhythm; it’s fairly light in weight, and the curves are a bit squarish, which combined with the generous x-height emphasizes the whitespace and increases (in my opinion) readability. I also love the lowercase “k” letterform.

Finally, I tweaked the homepage layout to be single column, as I felt the old two columns were too claustrophobic and it felt nice to simplify.

I still need to do up the darn tags page, which I’d never touched to begin with since moving to Jekyll. Also, after spending an entire blog post preaching about it, I need to do a styleguide for this site.

But, this redesign-ish work has gotten my juices flowing. Maybe I’ll actually start posting more regularly!