OK, first off I have to admit it: I am not completely happy with the layout. And then, my friend Joseph Pelrine (who blogs over there) pointed me to a piece of wisdom so trivial that it takes some time to come around to it: You get better with practice. Put differently, quantity of production increases the quality of your product. So, I closed the lid on the RNG design for now, and I’ll redo it as soon as I can’t bear to look at it. And it will look much better then, I’m sure.

Designing the rng was at the same time a huge, nasty flashback and a new experience. You see, I used to design quite a few websites a few years back. During the dot.com boom, and being a (politely said) not-very-well-paid graduate student, web design was a panacea. I kept my customers happy, and they kept me happy, as I could earn good money with a few extra hours.

Long nights spent in front of the screen, getting a web site ready for roll-out sound somewhat cool, in the romantically fogged retrospective. What I of course forgot, and what hit me as a flashback, is how hard it is to get the certain distinctive design idea across on screen, in HTML, and on every browser. That’s the designer’s nightmare that came back to me now when I did the rng.

But something has changed from way back then. I was out of the loop for some years, and web design evolved. Back then, standards were treated with utter disrespect, first from the browser manufacturers, and secondly from the designers, since the page needs to look right, no matter what browser, no matter what contorted table layout you use and how many 1-pixel-gif are cruelly abused in the production.

Standard adherence seems to have improved a lot while I was away (I hope there’s no causality in that statement). Back then, CSS was the thing you used to format your fonts a little. Nowadays, CSS has evolved into the magic bullet, promising to (finally) separate content from presentation, and enabling content display adapted to the output medium.

In short, as an exercise, I refrained from all old-school web designer tricks, and designed this blog solely using CSS. I learned a lot. And I still have a lot to learn, but that’s for the next incarnation. Right now, I am just happy that everything is readable and loosely conforms to the vision I had in mind when doing the first photoshop layouts for this site.

Update: Some explanatory links to help cope with my unrestrained use of abbreviations.

Posted by Michael on Thursday, February 5th, 2004 at 12:20 am.