Andrea Gandino

After I came back from holidays, I looked at my site and I felt good about it. You know, most of the time I design something, I’m satisfacted with if for a certain amount of time, then I get bored. It only happens with what I design for myself.

This time it was different. I still liked the idea behind my design, and its implementation, for the most part. I just felt like there was something I didn’t get right. I perceived it as sort of messy and somewhat distracting, which is for me the epitome of what a design shouldn’t be. So I decided to rethink about it.

Special thanks go to my friend Simone, who helped me in identifying a series of little things that I had missed, and even some usability inconsistencies.

Most of the times it’s the little details that make the difference, and being much more painstaking this time, while striving to maintain the ensemble feeling — the old book type-of thing — surely helped me a lot in developing a more solid design.

The biggest change from the very first release, was the column system. Boom. It seems like an obvious thing, but it changed my judgement completely.

I’m surely not reinventing the wheel, but, really, sticking to a well defined grid gives your product a whole different kind of feeling (even if you can break out of it, but that’s another story).

For some reason I’m not inclined to use any kind of CSS framework (even if some of them are cool, and handy for sure); I always build stuff myself, with only Eric Meyer’s reset stylesheet as a base. Of course, this implies much more thinking and calculations.

Now, since difficulties might lead to laziness, perhaps this was the reason why the first version of this website wasn’t that accurate, in terms of spacing (both horizontal and vertical).

Sticking to a four column layout, each one of them equally spaced, helped me in achieving a kind of balance that simply wouldn’t have been possible, otherwise. I also adopted a 16px base unit for vertical spacing: I’ve tried to stick to that rhythm as much as possible, that means (almost) always ensuring that the sum of leading and text size would be 16px or a multiple of it.

This is my version of “Typography for Dummies” perhaps, but it really is something that I completely ignored just a few months ago and that it is absolutely essential (talk about developing knowledge, I will write something about my Web-related lectures soon).

For those of you wondering, this place still hasn’t IE support. I’m not sure IE6 will ever have one, but I’m definitely planning a testing session with IE7.

Speaking of browsers, this website is OK on Google Chrome too (thanks Webkit). Of course by saying OK I’m referring to the layout, and I’m not considering the uglyquestionable Windows font rendering.

Among other goodies, I’ve created an Elsewhere page, where all the stuff coming from the different pieces of me scattered on the web is collected. Feel free to add me, if you want: I won’t bite.