A New Website and a Blog

After just 19 years, I got a new website! The old, now retired one had been in charge since 1999. It held up pretty well for a number of years and then various attempts to a redesign met appeals for preserving the design for historic reasons, so it was somewhat under preservation order. However, times change and so do objective demands…

So what has changed in the past 19 years? Not so much for design principles itself, especially, since in the late 1990s flat design was pretty much a thing for professional understatement, which provided a bit of timelessness. (There had been also a recent trend regarding legibility vs illegibility in visual design, but, while this was reflected by a particular design element, this wasn't much of an issue for this website.) What really changed, is the size of display pixels, text-sizes in general, and overall display dimensions.

Around the millennium, a certain minimal display size was (finally!) guarantueed, with displays promising to eventually only increase in size. Then, the standard display pixel ratio was still 72dpi. While multisync CRT displays where usually driven at a higher resolution, especially on PCs, Windows made up for it by a rather big standard display size. (In fact, websites used to size the typography down by a notch to compensate for this. As in “<font size="-1">…</font>”. But beware of Windows changing Arial from bold print to letter spaced at small text sizes!) Also, the general trend in web typography was towards a small, clear print — remember those 7 point pixel fonts used in Flash applications? In the end, this added up to a typography much too small and too faint for modern displays and reading habits, which is, why there was now an objective need for a redesign.

Moreover, and probably most prominently, displays not only became bigger, as promised, but also radically smaller, as in mobile, raising additional requirements for a wider separation of elements and touch targets. While table based layouts, if done right, where generally responsive (compare the current trend in grid layout, which is basically the same), this didn't work out well with a second, new requirement, namely accessibility. Especially, since the provisions used earlier to target handheld or accessibility related devices were depricated and have come out of use since. (Compare accessibility and handheld media selectors vs media queries and WAI-ARIA.)

Time for a new approach: The new site should meet all those requirements, and, ironically (if you do know some of my work) it does so without using JavaScript (any live bits are done in SVG and/or CSS). Also, sticking to a tradition of lean resources and fair content provision, there's no user tracking whatsoever.

While we are at it, what about a blog, a quick box of virtual index cards and assorted notes, something I was wanting to do, even before I started the original website? Sure, there are things like G+, but those public, social network oriented forums provide not the means for a medium to long text form, possibly including explanatory graphics and live content. However, G+ (as long as it is still a thing) isn’t entirely out of the picture, as I will relate to it for any discussions.

So here you are, have fun!