Colour Scheme
Posted: Mon 16 February, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Redesign, Thoughts 5 Comments »Following on from a conversation via Twitter on Friday, I’m wondering about the colour-scheme and design here. I know, go through a redesign and migration (and organisation) and suddenly I want to do another one. Live with it.
The fact is, it took me ages to find a template with a significant dollop of yellow in it – obviously yellow isn’t all that popular when it comes to designs.
Those with long memories will know that D4D™ was initially called “Destruction For Dummies” rather than “Dummies for Destruction”, and the initial design (if I can call it that) was based on the “For Dummies” range of books. Then I got that ‘cease and desist’ email from Wileys telling me that “[Anything] For Dummies” was part of their trademark. So the name changed (but stayed as D4D) and here I’ve been since. And the yellow’s stayed too.
Of course, with the new template I don’t need to have the rubbish with the colour switcher. But I do wonder whether I should screw about even more, and possibly change the appearance of D4D™ beyond all recognition from the old version.
I don’t know yet. We’ll see.
And of course if you’ve got any views, let me know in the comments, yeah?
Step back a minute.
Why do you have this blog? What do YOU want from it?
My current design (whilst I’ve always been very minimal in design) is focussed on allowing me to write ‘better’ (longer) posts. I used to have the miniblog which factored into the design but, ultimately my blog is about my writing so that is my focus for the design.
Why does the colour matter (PLEASE don’t go back to the jarring schemes you’ve had before).
Not having seen previous incarnations of D4D I can’t compare this how it looked before, but I like it – I like the layout and the simple/effective colour scheme. It’s light on imagery, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t really convey anything about Dummies for Destruction though, so if you wanted to resurrect that message you could add some images to the current design, or, as you say, start again. I’m willing to help if it’s of any use 🙂
[Oooh, a “reply to comment” facility. That’s new…]
The colour doesn’t “matter” as such, although I do like the yellow anyway. So the odds are I’ll keep it – although if I’m honest, I normally had the ‘worksafe’ colour scheme activated for my own viewing of D4D™, which kind of negates the entire thing anyway.
Rest assured, I don’t actually plan to go back to the eye-jarring colours – despite the fact they amused me- (and particularly when it went to Pink for October) but there may be another redo on the cards by year-end.
For now though, I think I’m generally happy with where it’s all going, so it’ll stay at this design for a while.
I actually thought, headache-inducing though they were, your old colours really established the identity of your site. It really didn’t look like any other site on the web – and not necessarily in a bad way. Your new design, though requiring less Disprin to view it, looks more like a conveyor-belt blog to me.
I spent a lot of time (with my VERY limited coding skills) adapting a blank template for my blog, and although it doesn’t look absolutely amazing, I know it doesn’t look exactly the same as any other blog or site.
It seems like you actually give a fuck about it, so you’re definitely (probably? maybe?) not going to rest until you’re 100% happy with the look.
*cough*
Ahem, yeah, that’s kind of happened in the last ten minutes.
And I’m *much* happier with this one…