Ejecutive

Ejecutive is now sporting a brand new design, called Veracity. This is my first theme based on The Sandbox, and also my entry into The Sandbox Competition.

Its my first grid-based design for years, although there isn’t much to do for grid based designs with a standard blog format, I’ve tried to be as faithful to the format as possible. I have to give thanks to Khio Vinh’s excellent post and related slides about good grid design which was a big inspiration for making this design grid based.

The design is very narrow, being only 650 pixels wide despite over 99% of visitors having a screen that is wider¹ this is to artificially limit the width of the content to preserve readability.

I almost went with a plain black and white colour scheme, but I decided to retain Ejecutive’s traditional dark and deep tonality with bright highlights. It’s also the first grid based design Ejecutive’s had since Opacity, and its a welcome return I think.

The competition only allows modifications to the stylesheet and not the markup, so I was rather limited in what I could achieve. But The Sandbox excels at giving you a very solid base to design from, especially with a set of layout stylesheets included which saved me the trouble of setting up the sidebar on the right² and very well thought through markup. This competition should show just how far you can go with this base.

Wish me luck!

Two new OS X applications were released today, CSSEdit and Coda. With them comes two new and different styles of tabs.

Coda:

CSSEdit:

Coda takes a Camino—style approach to tab design, while CSSEdit’s is more Safari. I prefer CSSEdit’s personally, it’s clearer which tab is selected and it does it with less visual elements (or visual clutter). But there’s no reason why OS X should have so many different styles of tabs for documents. It’s one of the last few user interface widgets¹ that has yet to be standardised, but one that is becoming increasingly popular.

Hopefully Leopard will feature a default tab widget for Cocoa that most people will adopt to use in their applications, and hopefully it’ll look something like CSSEdit’s elegant implementation.

I think most people who know me will say that I’m probably the grumpiest person at Christmas. I couldn’t care less if we celebrated it or not, but I do enjoy the two bank holidays and the good food. But this year, I feel like getting a bit more into the festive spirit, so I’ve redecorated Ejecutive with a almost-Christmas-tree-like-but-not-quite-green colour.That’s all you’re getting, so stop standing around waiting for more and go away and enjoy Christmas away from your computer!

Ever since I decided to disable public commenting on Ejecutive nearly four months ago, I’ve been closely monitoring the traffic and regular readership. I’ve released a steady stream of improvements to Ejecutive since then, mainly Opacity2 and upping the professionalism of my writing, so you’d think that my readership should improve eh?

Well you’d be wrong.

Facing the facts

Things did start quite well, with an eight per-cent increase in visits in September compared to August, while the number of unique visitors remained the same. However October saw a 38 per-cent drop in visits compared to September, and 40 per-cent drop in unique visitors. Things got worse in November which saw a 21 per-cent drop in total visitors compared to October, but the number of unique visitors did remain the same.

If you look in the archives, it’s easy to see a big reason why this is happening, in September I wrote eight articles, all of which were in the first half of the month. Then there was a gap of over a month before my next article in the second half of October. In total there were only two articles in October. And again in November I only wrote three articles although at least they were spaced out evenly across the month.

Fixing Ejecutive

Thinking back, I don’t remember why I got such a boost in early September to write so much, but it obviously helped the success of the site hugely, especially seeing as one of my articles was heavily linked to and got submitted to Digg. But I know I have to get that drive back if I want stop the slide in readership after all the hard work I’ve put into Ejecutive to make it successful. So I’m going to try a little experiment, I’m going to post an article on Ejecutive at least five times a week. This means you’ll be getting ten times more love (articles), and I’m not just talking about links, these will be proper articles about anything I care about, not just technology, the web and politics, but also music, photography and cinema/movies/film.

I’m also going to add a more personal touch to this site, as you’ve probably noticed in my last article. I’ve asked for feedback, which as been 100 per-cent positive, so I’ll be sticking with it for the time being. With the standard blog format of Opacity2, I find some of my best articles are lost with time, and it’s increasingly hard to find them, I’ve got to figure out a way to feature them, and figure out some time to do it in.

I do have a cold at the moment, which probably means I’ll have it over the weekend too, so I may as well make the best of a bad situation and work on Ejecutive, making the site easier to navigate as a whole and bring more structure to the content. While I do love the minimalistic design of Oapcity2, maybe its turning my visitors away instead of inviting more in.

Here it is, the new design for Ejecutive, which I’ve dubbed Opacity Strikes Back (or Opacity2).

Being a Minimalist, I was never completely happy with the original Opacity. The initial design was too complicated, and so when I tried to implement it, the complexity got out of hand, to the stage where the CSS alone was split into seven different files and totalled over 20KB.

I didn’t put enough thought into the whole design procedure, and in the end design aesthetics won over usability. Even though the design was eventually scaled back and improved, a dark blue background made text hard to read for all but the lucky few with high contrast monitors. I also choose to justify the text, without doing much research into why this would make the text harder to read.

The problem lies in the current trend of having fancy graphics, reflections and bold colours, when the real design issue is typography. Information Architects explains the problem well:

Information design is not about the use of good typefaces, it is about the use of good typography. Which is a huge difference. Anyone can use typefaces, some can choose good typefaces, but only few master typography.

I’m not saying I’ve mastered typography, but I can tell the difference between good typography, and bad typography. Opacity had bad typography, and I was a little ashamed to have designed and used it on my website.

Opacity2 is the expression of my Minimalistic ideals. Every superfluous feature has been striped out, and replaced by white space. In fact, you’ll notice that there is a lot of white space between almost everything. I’ve optimised and tweaked the line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing to create what I believe is currently the most usable typography I can muster out of Georgia. You may also notice there are lots of white space between posts and between paragraphs, and all the white space is relative to each other, so the space between posts is three times that of the space between paragraphs, and so on.

It’s about time us so-called “designers” starting educating ourselves about the real design, and face the fact that over 95% of the content you create will be text, so you number one priority when designing should be how to treat the text.

Going off on a tangent here, but this is also the first design and theme I’ve made using completely open source tools, not relying on Macromedia Dreamweaver or TextMate as I usually do¹ but instead using the excellent Notepad2 by flo. Thumbs up for using the right tool for the job.