About the New Design

by phil on Friday Jun 3, 2005 4:28 PM

Discussion about the new design for Philosophistry.

The Movable Type template for this site was generated from Adobe ImageReady. I used the template tags like <MTEntries> and put them in the slice specifications. There is zero modification of the HTML between the "Save Optimized" command in ImageReady and Movable Type rebuilding my index.

To create the movie, I found an iTunes visualization called eyephedrine. I then used Snapz Pro to record my screen as a quicktime movie. Then I used Flash MX 2004 to turn that into a flash movie.

I like anarchy, and the theme of this funky new design is mis-direction.

I still want the site to be usable, and hence the layout for this series of posts remains fairly vanilla. One of my cousins says that this site is simpler, which I found surprising at first. But then it makes sense, as I have one side of the site for my craziness and separate side for the posts. The posts are immediately visible -- above-the-fold as they say. Also, all the extraneous information, such as contact info, is thrown into a button in the upper left-hand corner.

I mentioned Duchamp before. What I like about Duchamp is not necessarily his Dada tendencies, but his preternatural ability to circumvent norms. This ability is actually innate for the amateur (because he doesn't know any better), and so I borrowed quite a bit from places like geocities and myspace. However, unlike those amateurs, I want to preserve usability.

Also, my normative breaks are not for violation's sake only; in addition to the hilarity of incongruence, there is some purpose to these things. For example, I found that shimmering iTunes visualization just as audacious as any myspace writer finds music videos. Or that choice of a blue color (#0088FF) on the front-front page is one of my favorite colors in web design. Plus, I'm interested in aesthetics, and so I tried to avoid ugliness in the face of disconcordance.

Comments

gerry said on June 26, 2005 4:24 PM:

MaY I suggest that you make your website and webpages, or what you want people to see and read on the computer screen, follow a more conventional display or presentation method.

What do I mean by that?

I am sorry but I find your materials on the screen hard to navigate.

What then do I find easy to navigate?

Maybe like this which I find easier to navigate:

Make a table of contents where each line is a link to the materials the line is concerned about.

Just like when I come to a book I don't give attention to the graphics and fancy pictorial works and colors, I just go straight to the text giving me the title and subtitle and author of the book and some indications of what it is all about, and publiction data. Then I open the book to the table of contents...

You get the idea I guess.

You have three choices of how your materials are presented, but I can't find any one easy for me to navigate. It's a pity, because I seem to suspect that you might have very useful things to tell people like me.

gerry

Philip Dhingra said on June 26, 2005 8:38 PM:

Your wish has been granted. http://www.philosophistry.com/