FG Late Night Redesign

Thursday, Sep. 30 2004 | Author: Scrivs

So I was talking to my business partner/friend Mike Rundle last night about business issues over at Business Logs and decided it was a good time to have a beer. Well if it was a good time to have a beer then it was most definitely a good time to redesign Forever Geek I figured because we all know that black, white, red color scheme wasn’t really working too well and everything was just too cluttered.

I wanted to get back to simplicity because that is what I like, but I also wanted to finish it before the sun rose. What a fun task. However, I didn’t completely finish it, but I like it better than the old design already. If you are using Firefox then come check it out. If you are using IE you might want to stick with the RSS feeds ;-).

Since I haven’t slept yet and have been up for 24 hours I think I will take a nap and finish up when I wakeup, so please have some patience as I will hammer out the fixes sometime this year.

For those of you who missed it, here was the last design:

Good night…errrr…good morning.

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26 Responses for "FG Late Night Redesign"

Vinnie Garcia

September 30th, 2004 at 7:25 am
1

Looks nice. I liked the last design, but it did seem as though every single link and piece of text on the page would compete for prominence. The logo and the content have again taken the major role in this redesign, so good work. You might want to remove the border on the bottom of the “email this to a friend” form though; it competes with the top border of the page footer. Other than that, looks great, and it reminds me of classic Scrivs style :).
Derek

September 30th, 2004 at 8:22 am
2

I liked the old one a whole lot better. :( It had much more personality and was a lot more unique.
David Hund

September 30th, 2004 at 8:24 am
3

Sweet, but standard… :-(

I like this design better, from a ‘user perspective’. I like this design less, from a ‘design perspective’.

It is very ‘you’, but (imho) a little bit too much: “Daring Fireball_Whitespace++”

Not dorky enough to be nerdy.

But again: reads fine, navigates fine. As usual :-)

I suppose the new advertising (no Google_ads, the ’sponsored boxes’) is going to be in here somewhere?
Tom

September 30th, 2004 at 8:32 am
4

Found your site today via blogcatalog and I’ll def be back for more. !! Keep up the good work
Barbutti

September 30th, 2004 at 8:40 am
5

It’s just like Derek and David said, it’s not as unique as the old one but it’s pretty and I like it. Don’t know which one I prefer though…
Cheah Chu Yeow

September 30th, 2004 at 8:49 am
6

Nice job Paul, especially the look of the active tab. This makes me so glad I blog here as well ;-)
Jeremy Flint

September 30th, 2004 at 9:19 am
7

Good job Scrivs. I have found an odd thing happening with the menu on Safari 1.2.3 on OSX 10.3.5.

When I mouseover store, and the dropdown comes out, after i mouseout of it, the right hand side (about 15-20px) is still showing until i either scroll down and back up, or resize the window.

Just an FYI
Iolaire McFadden

September 30th, 2004 at 10:21 am
8

Thanks, this is much easier to read. Though I can not picture the design before last in my mind, but I feel like it is similar as in being plain and less distracting in reading.
Julian

September 30th, 2004 at 10:27 am
9

In my opinion the old design was better. I do not visit the site very often nor am I a subscriber to the feed, but the old design just looked more like “geek”.
Jeff Croft

September 30th, 2004 at 10:32 am
10

Paul-

I think this one trumps the last one by a good margin. Nice work!
Lea

September 30th, 2004 at 10:57 am
11

Looks sweet. Reminds me a bit of Daring Fireball, which is nice. I like how much cleaner it looks.

The only thing I’m kind of having a problem with is how large the FG logo is. It’s a tad distracting.
Brendan Avery

September 30th, 2004 at 11:07 am
12

Love the new design. Much easier to read and navigate. Plus is just very attractive. Also I can open it up at work now without feeling like people looking over my shoulder think I’m looking at a video-game website. Hurray! Great job!
sean

September 30th, 2004 at 11:36 am
13

FREEDOM!!!

That last design was too cramped for my tastes.
Scrivs

September 30th, 2004 at 12:18 pm
14

Glad to see the mixed reactions to this one, means you peeps care about the site. Really I was being greedy and needed something that was easier to read for myself :-)

I know it has less of the crazy, cluttered geek appeal, but I think it works better on so many other levels than the previous design. Oh well, that’s what you get for 5 hours of late night work with some beers.
Scrivs

September 30th, 2004 at 12:20 pm
15

And yes there are some more graphical changes (eg. icons and such) coming.
Nicole

September 30th, 2004 at 12:43 pm
16

I like that it’s more open as well as cleaner. It’s still pretty dark, but definitely better.
JC

September 30th, 2004 at 1:04 pm
17

Next time you redesign, paul… use a new CSS file name… it’ll stop us poor souls in corporate environments from having to refresh the page a half dozen times to convince the proxy server to give up its old copy. :-)
Ditto for any logo changes
Scrivs

September 30th, 2004 at 1:31 pm
18

I actually did start with a new stylesheet, but at 2am I got lazy. Sorry about that.
Jason Marble

September 30th, 2004 at 3:32 pm
19

I love it. Never really did like the last design much, but it did have character as some people have mentioned.

So, I’ld probly throw in some more detail. Give this design a little more character. Throw in some obscurities that only us geeks would probly notice.

I love the color tone. It feels nice. But maybe try using some other colors to accentuate things a little bit.

But mainly, I think it’s just missing a little character. Well done though.
Scrivs

September 30th, 2004 at 3:38 pm
20

Any suggestions on adding character? I have ideas, but my ears are always open.
Brian Behrend

September 30th, 2004 at 4:30 pm
21

The thing I just realized, this site and John Gruber’s may be literally the only 2 weblogs that I read that doesn’t have some sort shade of white as the main content area’s bg. Most use actual white, while some like Zeldman just a really light shade of their basic color.

It’s a nice change of pace and overall I like the design, but I really think for a content/text-heavy site a light background with dark text is easier to read. Maybe it’s just me.
JC

October 3rd, 2004 at 6:08 pm
22

you killed the search box : (
Scrivs

October 4th, 2004 at 12:52 am
23

Ummm, how did I kill it? Works for me.
JC

October 4th, 2004 at 2:11 am
24

The search box doesn’t display at all in IE. Might want to fix that.
Chris

October 20th, 2004 at 12:14 pm
25

as far as refreshing half a dozen times, any address with a query string breaks cache

so… http://forevergeek.com/forever_geek/fg_late_night_redesign.php?noPlaceLike=localhost

would bust every item in cache first time around…
JC

October 20th, 2004 at 12:40 pm
26

that wouldn’t affect the files included in the page, which is the issue with CSS based redesigns when you don’t change the name of the CSS file.