papa's got a brand new bag...

watermark template 2006Or rather... yaniblog's got a brand new look...

Honestly it's not quite right yet... I'm not loving the way the text looks in the Blogger profile (mostly the text colour and the length of the lines)... and because this is so much wider than my old template it looks like Random Hotness's mood indicators are probably going to be universally screwed throughout the whole blog...

*sigh*

On the plus side, this one is about 100 times easier to change than the previous template...

But after I commented yesterday about wanting a whole new look for the blog, I sat down and actually started to take a couple of things apart to see how they worked and see how I could modify them...

I'd kinda worked it out by lunchtime, but I took some time off to grab some lunch, watch some Queer Eye, and then go shopping briefly... when I got back I sat down and really hammered it out... scrapped everything that I'd been working on before lunch and came up with something that I liked... then tweaked it... and tweaked it... and tweaked it...

Like I mentioned about BlueDragon's birthday card, I'm really easily sucked into a design project... and this was no exception... I must have started working on it at about 2:30, maybe 3pm... I didn't come up for air, literally, until about 6:30pm... I don't even think I got up to pee that whole time... nothing... just sitting here fiddling with images in Photoshop and CSS and HTML...

Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle...

And then I came back to it at about 9:30 and fiddled some more...

But here it is... I'm going to live with it for a few days, maybe a week, so I can see how it looks and how it performs... I'll probably tweak certain bits of it during that time (although if anyone can tell me how to alter the text in the profile section, and get rid of that white streak up at the top, then I love you long time!)...

Thoughts? Opinions?

Current Mood: yani made a pretty

13 comments:

S said...

It's different.

It may take some time to get used to something shiny and new, so don't sweat the details.

Larry said...

I love it. The only thing I noticed is that the text overlaps the color of your sidebar a little. Personally I think the body should only be in the white area.

Then again, I'm picky like that :) I really do think it looks great!

yani said...

Yeah Larry, that was of the things I was whining about... but I just worked out how to fix it, so it should be all contained now...

Oh, wait... you're saying the body text spills over onto the sidebar image?

If it's doing that, then it's a resolution problem (ie you have a smaller res than 1024x768)... either that or you happened to view the blog in the five minutes while I was tinkering around with the settings for the column width... which, having seen when you posted your comment, is actually the more likely... hehehe...

And Steven, I've worked in design and around designers long enough to know what "It's different" means... :P

Sunshine said...

I love it. It's nice and clean. I'm such a minimalist at heart. :P

Tom said...

I think it's really good. I like the background image for the sidebar.

It works fine on a mac, although I still can't read your mood indicator thingys... Safari takes the img alt="..." tag literally and doesn't display the alternative text in a tooltip. img title="..." on the other hand would work perfectly :P

Also increasing the spacing between the lines like your old template would make it a bit easier to read, particularly on the meme type lists. That's beyond my HTML skills and I think it needs a bit of tinkering with CSS which is a bit newfangled for me :)

yani said...

*mutters under his breath about Macs*....

And it might just be the way the new template reacts with Mac browsers, but technically the body font is actually set at the same size and spacing as the old template, because I was quite fond of the way that looked...

Jenny said...

It's very crispy and new, though I like the pink.. hmm. I'll have to mull it over for a while!

Tom said...

Not sure if this is what you mean when you say you want to change the text in the profile section, but do a search on the template with this and then tinker with it:


.profile-textblock {
color:#fff;
font:11px Verdana,Sans-serif;
margin:0 0 .5em;
}


And what's wrong with macs... both safari and firefox mac are the most standards compliant browsers you can get... none of this lazy internet explorer malarcky! :P

yani said...

Yep Tom... that was indeed what I had to change... but because I'd changed something else which contradicted that somewhere further down the code, I had to change that first before the other bit would work... it's all terribly complicated and inter-related...

I totally hear what you're saying about the text size and sidebar Ben... I just happen to completely disagree with you :P... I went through my whole archive last night checking to see if anything was radically broken (which, luckily, wasn't the case)... and reread a few things... and totally didn't have trouble with the text... but if you're using a Mac like Tom, then I'm guessing it's a Mac issue with the particular font size or layout I'm using...

Tom said...

then I'm guessing it's a Mac issue with the particular font size or layout I'm using...

It's almost like you don't care or something! :P

yani said...

No... *arches eyebrow*...whatever gave you that idea? :P

Tom said...

No idea!

Anyway... this is a picture of your blog through mac eyes... and shows what I meant about the line spacing... the glitter template had lines further apart.

Oh well... who cares... I only come here to comment - I read you through an RSS feeder!! *shit, did I say that out loud*!! :P

S said...

Why would you say I meant "different" to mean something else but different?

If I didn't like it, I would... well, I wouldn't say I didn't like it.