JimCloudman.com, 2012 Edition

Even before the unfortunate events of Tuesday night, my blog was due for a redesign. In retrospect the blog redesign last year might have been more minimalistic and perhaps even better quality in its creation, it didn’t convey fun at all, and the header always looked a bit awkward. The first point was the most important: no matter how nice the writing is and how clean the elements of the page are, the first thing people will notice about your site is the personality it shows. At the same time, I wasn’t thrilled with the typography.

So, in a mad coding session last night that lasted for about five hours or so, I created this:

Right off the bat I think this theme has a lot more personality than the last theme did. Look at those clouds! Don’t they make you feel happy? Below that, though, is actually an even more minimalist content area. Just the text, title and an icon indicating what type of post it is. No notes, no share buttons, not tags, no nothing except the bare essentials.

The design has no images apart from the background texture, the cloud background that goes over top of it, and any of the other clouds. The navigation bar is pure CSS3, as is the footer (again, except for the cloud icons). The post icons are all actually dingbats from the Pictos web font. They’re really nice when they work, but when they don’t you get the situation that IE9 users are having right now, where there are oddly placed letters instead of icons. I’ll work to patch that up later on. Also, IE users have a badly placed search box in the upper navigation which will also have to be fixed later on.

And you thought the days of IE hacks were over!

Other than that, I like how my blog has turned out. It’s much more fun to use than the old theme. There’s still a few kinks to work out here and there, but I think 2012 is going to be a great year for JimCloudman.com.