Reviews area redesign

Goodbye to the old reviews site design (frames (!), huge amounts of show/hide div layers, fairly limited stylesheet control, Dreamweaver templates):

And hello to the new one (type and layout controlled by CSS, no frames, streamlined navigation, alt tags for images, standardised, front page provides access to my RSS feed of recent reviews + creative commons licence + links to my Flickr music photography area, it’s still Dreamweaver template driven for simplicity’s sake):

Dan kindly wrote:

I like it a lot. The aesthetics feel slightly awkward to me, which is entirely a good thing. Specifically the background image of lampposts and the merest glimpse of a rooftop, and the block-coloured links. It’s good to break with the received notions of (eg.) what links should look like, what is considered obviously significant or meaningful with background imagery. What’s the thinking behind the blanked out bird shapes?

To which I replied:

There’s other silhouettes up there – a hangglider, hot air balloons, etc. The homepage background was the first image. I wanted a basic background, something a little stark, but not something that would detract much from the main content, the writing. I liked the angles of the lamps because CSS layouts are generally so regular vertically/horizontally. The lampposts on their own looked a little too bare so I added a bird as some sort of presence and the white plays/links to the white block. For the subpages I couldn’t go with the photographic background because it would tile and look crap so I had to opt for a plain colour, but it looked too plain so I started to add silhouettes relating to the blue sky, but also there’s a really naff but deliberately humorous equation of hawks and reviewers (arf). I’m glad you liked it, my friend at work calls the type of link I’ve used ‘marker pen’ links.

It’s a bit of a bloody nightmare transferring the files though – couldn’t really rejig the template and apply the new design so I’m having to move over 500 or so content files by hand (aaaargh…). Anyway I this design, being standards-driven should last a bit longer than the last one (which is a bit more than two years old. 115 cd reviews files to go…

PS The reviews archive also has a name now ~ Somnambule ~ a tad pretentious sounding I know, but it translates roughly as sleepwalker and I associate thinking/writing about music somehow with sleepwalking, much can be intellectualised, defined and emoted about music – and usefully so – but ultimately it remains a strange, other mass of individual languages/dialects that’s weirder and more thanatos-ridden (in its temporal, never-stopping-and-still-making-sense aspect) than any other cultural sign.

PPS The redesign perpetuates my current love affair with the Century Gothic typeface which I also implemented on this blog a while back. My fellow OSX users will see this, PC users will see Verdana I believe. It would be good to know what the nearest PC font to Century Gothic is. My present favourite succeeded a brief period of Gill Sans, nice but too heavy for easy reading as a body font.