Happy New Year, everyone.
It’s been two and a half years since I put together the inaugural, bleached-boards design for this site’s incarnation as Coyote Crossing. Given that Creek Running North went through something like six redesigns in five years, I was starting to feel like a revamp was a bit overdue. So here it is.
There are a few loose ends here and there, and don’t hesitate to file bug reports if you find bugs worth reporting. (You can use comments here, or send me an email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).) We should have working archives and tags and individual article pages, search should be up and running, and the new site will profile my photos a bit more photogenically. But there are still some issues. Occasionally twitter will cause the follower count in the upper right hand corner to return a big fat ZERO, and when that happens the last few tweets in my feed, generally displayed in the big dark footer at the base of each page, will also come up bØrken. At least you won’t see ugly error codes there. I’m also working on getting the image slider not to come up on subsequent archive pages, though maybe — given that I’m trying to sell photos — that’s a feature rather than a bug.
I’ll be making it easier to share each post on Facebook and Twitter and such before long as well.
Also coming soon, once I get another third-party website or two designed, will be a portfolio section for my design side business — likely including a few rants here and there about nonprofit best practices on the web. But that’s later.
I’m not sure you’re eager for comments on the new look and I sure don’t mean to offend. Also I’m not a particularly good noticer, nor very computer savvy. I’m using the Chrome browser in Ubuntu Linux. Here goes with my first reaction: Damn that type looks small.
By copy and pasting into a LibreOffice Writer document, it looks like you’re using Helvetica Neue 9 pt. The old style looks like Georgia 9.7 pt. I found the old type easier to read, at least I never had the reaction that the site was hard to read. Perhaps Helvetica Neue in a larger point would be easier to read.
Mostly I read your posts in a feed reader (Liferea) so the font here doesn’t matter too much to me. I very much like the clean looks otherwise and I’m sure the back end improvements will rock.
Good comment, John. I’ll likely futz a bit more with the font size after I’ve had a few hours not looking at the design. Haven’t used Chrome on Linux, but you might try hitting Ctrl-+ once to see if it resizes more to your liking.
Anyone else have an opinion on the font size?
I agree the font size could be sized up one notch (I used command+ to check it out - one + was good, two started to look a bit “easy reader”). I like the clean spareness of the overall look, though.
I wish I’d held my tongue. More than anything my reaction was just the shock of the new. You are a stellar writer and a very good designer and that opinion goes before and after the site’s new incarnation. Right after reading this post I read a long post and even longer comment thread somewhere in Lucinda 9pt. I didn’t make any adjustments. Often these days I use Readability for longer articles and sites that have a bunch of distractions, so I don’t hesitate to use it when a site is hard for me to read. Sans serif fonts at 9pt. are widely used these days. It’s not clear what I was reacting to, except that ctrl+ really is more to my liking ;-)
If there is anything useful in my feedback it’s that the site renders well in a somewhat uncommon computer setup.
Happy New Year and thank you for making your art available to us.
Oh, good, you fixed the comment form! I like the new look (was never that crazy about the old). I like designs that are clean, fairly minimalistic, and keep the focus on the content. I do agree the font could be one notch larger. The choice and arrangement of sidebar items are excellent.
You might consider making the header clickable to the home page—- kind of a web standard now.
I’ve upped the base font size a scoche.
I love the look of the blog with the larger base font because it’s inviting to read. That’s not to everyone’s taste and I’m not a designer :-)
Wow. I like it! Clean, modern, to the point. Nice!