About This Design

Ooh, I love explaining my motivations behind a particular design and for this site there is a lot to talk about.

In terms of the visual effect, I wanted it to be clutter-free, I hate those sites that look like newsagent windows with a thousand postcards stuck in them. I wanted to avoid (where possible) boxes and straight lines not for any other reason than most web design can be about putting things in boxes.

Recently I have been working on my Engagement Engine, the icons of which are clouds. I like clouds and so that has become the theme for this design.

I wanted the "feel" to expansive (using all of the window) and yet pages that are narrower can be easier to read because of the shorter line length. There's a reason for A4. So this design is a compromise between "as wide as possible" and "about as wide as page".

Navigation is boring. I wanted this site to navigation-free if possible meaning I had to try and make sure that the content itself was richly interlinked. Always Having Somewhere To Go Next can be difficult, so I have made the site automatically link to other items.

The site map automatically updates itself.

Many sites are standalone creations but I wanted this to integrate with the rest of web, the rest of MY web... and so when I create a page on this site it automatically shows items I've tagged in Delicious, it automatically finds fresh news, it even finds old blog posts I may have written about.

Each page also finds newsfeeds

To create this site I developed a wiki tool which does all the things above but also does lots of other interesting thing such as creating graphics on-the-fly using python.