Finally, I have managed to redesign the blog. Somethings still need a final stroke but that can wait for a while. Now its time to share my thoughts on the new design.
Looking at the old design, the default design provided by Octopress, I felt a need to simlify it. There were many angles for simplification. The sidebar was a nice feature but it seemed like bit of a distraction when I tried to read the post from a reader's perspective. There was no "About" section in the navigation bar, its important to introduce ourselves to the readers to establish a connection. The Twitter section was not showing the latest tweets, instead it was just showing the 'Status updating...' view.
"Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication" - Leonardo da Vinci
So, in quest of simplifying the blog I followed the guidelines mentioned in the video below. It is from Apple's WWDC 2013 Keynote event. And it packs the best ideas on design you may ever hear or see, and that too in a short span of under 2 minutes.
See, I told you. The video is as amazing as their products are.
So, back to redesigning. I cloned the 'BlogTheme' theme. Started breaking Octopress down, understanding what each file did and what needed to be modified to achieve further minor modifications that the theme needed, to achieve my objective, 'Simplicity' indeed. But the fun part is, to display the posts the way I wanted, I had to deal with complexity of Octopress. It was more complex than I imagined. But let me not bore you with its complexity because as they say "A clockwork loses its lustre once one glimpses the gears beneath its face". But let me also tell you this, once the blog looked the way I wanted, no matter how small modifications I made to achieve it, knowing 'How things Work' and then 'Make it Work' made me really happy.
Now take a good look at the blog. The background is clear white, the fonts are black, Title and navigation turn red when you hover mouse over them (quit doing it again and again they might get red hot angry), bad joke, still moving on. Did you notice the post content is now justified. Its symmetry adds up to the blog's beauty. At the end of each post you will be able to see the categories the post belongs to. Clicking a certain category will display all the posts belonging to that category. There is nothing fancy or extraordinary styling to the blog and still it looks NEAT. Its the typography thats making it neat.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away"
I hope you liked the new design and the new reading experience.