One of my biggest goals when I moved to Wordpress was to be able to achieve new levels of design, something that I could never have with Blogger (not without sacrifices and huge amounts of hacker-y at least). The ability to organise the page sections in a way which makes the ‘layout’ as important as the ‘content’. Which looks good but also works to cut out the noise.

I’ve always admired John Gruber’s Daring Fireball both for what he writes, and the simplicity of the design. Completely devoid of images, he let’s his writing do the talking. That clearly shows that one doesn’t need flashy images and icons to make a page look attractive. In this era of “Web 2.0” designs, I think we’ve simply lost what ‘design’ used to be. Cut out the glassy buttons, rounded corners, bright-bubbly colours. Let’s talk about a clean and simple, sophisticated design.

Designer Geek

I’ve been working on this for two days, and really let things flow. Some presentation-al decisions were inspired by DF, but this is mostly something I had been playing around with the Layered Template on Blogger before I let it go and gave up. I’ve used as less imagery as I could consciously let myself, sticking to unicode magic to keep things clean and uniform.

The blue and black (and such dark shades too) remain as my favourite colours. The sidebar has been squashed thin to allow more content to show through. I’ll continue playing around with the widgets to see which ones should stay. I feel the lesser on the right, lesser the distraction. The big-blue ‘Getthefeed’ button is something I want to try and draw people’s attention to. Although I have a decent number of subscribers, who doesn’t like more, eh? If you complain about the font, save it. I’ve heard enough in the past, and I don’t plan to change it now. I’ve moved away from the modern looking “Verdana”, and gone for a more traditional ‘print’ look — how much ever I could with the limited typeface options.

I managed to come up with something for prime-time use quickly because it was easier with a frame of reference, and a rather clear idea in my head, but I can’t test everything on my own. So if you see something broken anywhere, or you can see that something is not right, don’t hesitate to let me know. That mostly involves things I might not have seen because I’m logged in (pages appear differently to me), or if things are little too subtle or integrated which might create a problem.

This is how it goes

I hope you like this one as much as I liked making it. Seeing as how I’ve finally got what I was looking for, this might very well be the last look-change for Geekaholic. But then again, I’ve said so in the past too! As far as “Web2Geek” (my previous template) goes, I plan to offer it for download soon. Again, I need a tester to help customize it for everyone, so please pitch in if you can. Cheers!