MyPropaganda!

Oh Helvetica, how I love you. I have returned to my favorite font for the 4th (I think) revision of mypropaganda. It has been almost a year since the last design so it was very much time.

I've been thinking about going for a mostly text based layout for a while now and so since I'm on holiday for two weeks I decided to give it a bash a few days ago. It's always tricky to base a design around just text because most people don't have the really good fonts installed and font rendering isn't consistant between operating systems. You can go the flash replacement route but that's not the best route for large chunks of text and I've had issues with it in the past - I ripped all the sIFR out of the old design and replaced with plain text not soon after I launched it because of this (although ironically, the simplicity of this design compared to the old one in layout terms would of made sIFR a workable option).

The site looks best if you have Helvetica installed and looks particularly handsome with OSX's font rendering but I'm still reasonably pleased with the results on a fresh windows install with no additional fonts installed.

The other major change is the way the content is laid out. I've also been thinking about this for a while - on the old site I was never really happy with the way it worked, even after tweaking it a bit. I've no decided to treat all content the same - be it a blog post, new photos uploaded to my flickr account or an update on which games I'm playing at the moment. If it's just been updated it'll go to the top and then work it's way down as more items are updated. Makes the site a bit more dynamic as I tended to update things like flickr or ma.gnolia more than I made new blog posts. For all really old blog posts you can use the Search/Archive button up at the top to browse them.

I must say it's been a much quicker and pleasurable process that the last time I designed the site. I coded my own blogging system along with hammering out ajax interface stuffs which all took rather a long time. I didn't have to do all that so it's only taken me 3 days from start to finish. I've been able to sit on my sofa, Macbook Pro in lap and tap away whist rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the start. Aren't holidays grand (I have been doing other stuffs, honest, but I'll write about my holiday shenanigans later).