Tribolum.com Making Light of Things

Thanks to all of you who provided feedback on the redesign. For those of you who’ve been reading Tribolum long enough, you’d know that I’d always provide more than one skin. Even on the first layout I had a “day” and “night” theme.

Like I’ve mentioned before, fire is extremely hard to design for because of its intensity. This trait has led to a particularly masculine layout (thanks Kris, for pointing that out), and the flames have not sat well with those of you who prefered a softer, gentler approach.

More than colours or themes, a main goal of my redesign was better use of typography. Zhenlin pointed out that the Times New Roman font used in the navigation were too formal. I did have the intention of making the layout slightly more formal than the previous one. This can be seen in the use of serif fonts for the headers and dates, while sans-serif fonts were preserved to maintain readability at small font-sizes.

First thing this morning I tweaked the CSS to display properly on IE6/Win. I set the main content to width:auto while floating the sidebar right. While coding to preserve semantics, one must bear in mind that the order the data is presented influences the presentation.

If the sidebar data came before the main contents, floating it right and giving it a fixed width would have allowed my main content to sit nicely on its left. But since it appears after the main content, the content area happily takes up all the width (width:auto) and pushes the sidebar to the bottom.

Unwilling to let the sidebar data take precedence over the main content (displayed in terms of importance) I had to work leftwards and fixing the two columns to percentage widths.

If you read to this point and understood all of that, we should meetup at the MT meetup sometime.