Sickdesigner

Hey, it’s me again. This new year has come with some major changes both for me personally and also for my favorite pet, so I think it’s fitting for this to be the first post of this new year. Read on, my good people, read on.

The newest member

Before getting on to the new design stuff, let me just welcome the newest member of the Sickdesigner.com team, my good friend, Liviu Dobre. We’ve worked together a while back and as part of the natural evolution of a slightly successful design blog, it was only fitting that he would join in. He’s got a great head for code and an unique way of looking at problems so we’ll probably be seeing some genius posts from him. No pressure, buddy…no…pressure.

Let’s play with magnets

As for me, well, tomorrow I’ll be starting my new job. I’m now a [proud] web designer of the MindMagnet team. Other than that, I cut my hair off [baldy style], got a new guitar and am doing hunky dory!

Back to the blog

As you can well notice, the color palette has…well…boomed since the previous version, which was almost entirely black and white. I do love me some dark backgrounds, though, so I just couldn’t let that one go. There’s a whole new list of features along with this new design and since I really like lists, here’s one:

01.Color coded categories.

The category label, comments, block quotes, pull quotes and a few other features all share color variants according to their respective category.

02.A strange structure

The structure is very unusual. Visually, the design is left-aligned-off [that's a new term I'm just now trying to coin]. That is, it creates a sort of off-balanced arrangement because of the 220px at the left side that are unused. As a result, the structure appears either partially left aligned, centered of partially right aligned according to resolution.

03.HTML5 and beyond

If you take the time to view the page source, you might find yourself asking “what the heck is this?”. It looks like part HTML5 and part mumbo-jumbo. Well, it’s going to be the subject of a new post this next week and it’s what I like to call super-semantic-html truly semantic html [apparently this year I'm trying to be a trendsetter]. What’s it all about? You might ask. It’s about adding another level of semantics to HTML and, like a lot of other things, it’s all made with the aid of jQuery.

04.CSS3 galore

Oh yeah, this one’s for all of you old-school browser lovers. I’ve probably used about 40% of the new CSS3 attributes. Basically everything from text-shadow to border-radius to rgba. And if you’re using any recent browser, you’re probably enjoying all of these goodies. Good for you.

05.Microformats

I’ve recently gotten very much into Microformats. They’re an absolutely awesome feature that I think any clear headed web designer should consider. The implementation of microformats on the new design is somewhat limited, both by my current knowledge of them, WordPress’ limitations and current draft status on some of the more appealing microformats. However, there are plans to implement more of these wonderful things in the very near future. Google, beware!

06.IE, of course

When using all of these advanced, progressive features one cannot avoid asking: where does IE fit into all of this? We’ve dropped support for IE7 and below and momentarily there’s only limited support for IE8, though that will be fixed within a couple of days. The reason we’ve excluded IE7 and below has mostly to do with the recent success of Windows7 which ships with IE8 as default. Considering this and the large market share drop of older IE versions, it was a logical and welcomed decision.

07.The kitty’s saved. For good.

The old design featured a somewhat funny message when there were no comments for a post. But no longer is the kitty in need of saving, but the entire blog! For now we feature ye mighty Willie!

08.The new logo

The old logo wasn’t very well done. In fact I think it was one of the least worked on elements of the last design. But no more. I’m clearly no logo designer but I think the current one can withstand most of the tests anyone can through at it. Props go to Sergiu Mocian of SmartPixel for all the help he’s given me with coming up with the new logo.

09.The twitter page

Last but not least, there’s the new Twitter page design. It’s an adaptation of the website design, but still worth a look, I think. Check it out here.

Well, there’s nothing much more to be said about the new design. Enjoy it, have fun with it, break it apart, but we’d rather you just read the posts.

by Radu Chelariu