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Hello, dear reader! Just a heads up that this article is deprecated and (probably) not worthy of your time. You are, of course, very welcome to read it — but I personally consider it to be outdated / irrelevant / embarrassing, and have removed it from my blog archive listings. Really, it’s only still here to stop old links from breaking. You have been warned!

A new elliotjaystocks.com

Article illustration for A new elliotjaystocks.com

At some point late this afternoon, in what can only be described as a moment of madness, I decided to drop all of the tasks on my plate — tasks which, without a shadow of a doubt, deserved the highest priority — and redesign my website. Unless you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you’re now witnessing the result of the last few hours’ work.

I’ve been frustrated with my site (the version shown in the screenshot above) for a long time now and a redesign attempt has been going on for the best part of a year. However, I decided to ditch all of that and start completely from scratch, designing purely in the browser, with the aim of getting a new design live before bedtime. I’ve just about managed it. Things will probably be a bit ropey for a while: images need resizing, baselines need aligning, and browsers need testing, but for now, I’m happy. The purpose of this redesign is that it’s undesigned. There’s virtually nothing to it: the focus is almost entirely on the type.

My apologies to my good friend and studio mate Jon Tan, because I completely nicked his idea for using only one font size throughout the site.

I’m not sure what straw it was that broke the camel’s back. I think it was that I’ve been writing about typography and responsive design for a while now, and it seemed oddly hypocritical doing so on a site with such terrible typesetting and absolutely no responsiveness. Redesigning was a necessity, and that’s probably what prompted me to do it so spontaneously. It’s also what prompted me to ditch the redesign I’ve been working on for the last few months: it was okay, and it was adaptive, but it wasn’t fluid, and therefore not fully responsive. It had to go.

As I write these words, it’s nearing 3am and my eyes are beginning to close, so I’ll leave further comments until tomorrow. However, one thing I will say is this: to all intents and purposes, this site is purely a blog right now. I’m still working on my portfolio, but as I’m not seeking new client work until summer 2012, I’m in no particular hurry to rush it out the door. The same goes for the speaking and publication pages: they’re in the works, but they’re not priorities. The blog (and general redesign) was a priority, so here we are.

Enjoy! I’ll probably hate it by the time I wake up.

Update: In the few days since posting this, I’ve made several tweaks to the design; some big, some small. If you’re interested, you can find notes in these comments from me: 1, 2, 3, 4.