content/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-sing.html @ 0817eb267b89

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{% hyde
    title: "Making My Site Sing"
    snip: "Designing with music."
    created: 2010-09-08 20:10:00
    flattr: true
%}

{% block article %}

Every year or so I get the urge to redesign my site. It's only been seven
months since the last time, so I guess working with [Nick Sergeant][] and
[Ali Ali][] at [Dumbwaiter Design][] has made me less satisfied than usual
with my previous design.

I didn't switch frameworks this time -- I'm still [using Hyde][] to generate
a set of flat HTML files.  I only changed the structure and layout of the
rendered site.

I'm a programmer, not a designer, but I think it looks fairly good.  I wanted
to write about how I went about designing the site because it might help other
programmers.

[Nick Sergeant]: http://nick.sg/
[Ali Ali]: http://alialithinks.com/
[Dumbwaiter Design]: http://dwaiter.com/
[using Hyde]: /blog/2010/01/moving-from-django-to-hyde/

[TOC]

Finding a Starting Point
------------------------

The first thing I had to do was come up with a basic idea for the style and
typography of the site.

I decided to go with my usual style: dark text on a light background, very few
images, and an overall feeling of "minimal."  If I had the graphic design
skills to make something impressive to look at I'd use them, but I don't, so
I wanted to stick with what I'm good at.

I read a lot of programmers' blogs and one thing that annoys me is that I often
end up using [Safari Reader][] to make their sites pleasant to read.  I want my
site to be pleasant to read *without* extra tools like Reader, so I took the easy
route and based the site's typography on Reader itself.

Reader uses 18px [Palatino][] body text with a 25px line height, so that's what
I went with.  I considered using [Georgia][] instead of Palatino, but
unfortunately Georgia has an absolutely terrible bold weight. I also kept the
width of the site small to mimic Reader.

[Safari Reader]: http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#reader
[Palatino]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino
[Georgia]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(typeface)

Creating a Vertical Rhythm
--------------------------

Once I had a line height in place I could start working on a [vertical rhythm][].
I used [Aardvark Legs][] as a base stylesheet and edited it to fit the new font
size and line height.

Unfortunately the original post by Aardvark Legs' author seems to have
disappeared.  In a nutshell: it's a CSS file that helps you set up a consistent
vertical rhythm.

I tried to keep myself honest by including a tiny bit of Javascript in the
footer of the site that displays the vertical rhythm. If you click on it you
should see that everything lines up properly (except the footer itself, which
falls on a halfway point).

For some entries the rhythm might not be perfect in non-Webkit browsers because
I had to use some [Webkit-specific styling][scrollbars] to fix the height of
scrollbars of wide `<pre>` blocks.

[vertical rhythm]: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/settingtypeontheweb/
[aardvark legs]: http://aardvark.fecklessmind.com/
[scrollbars]: http://webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars/

Designing to a Dominant Seventh
-------------------------------

In my spare time I play upright bass and teach blues dancing. I listen to a lot
of jazz and blues music while doing both and one of the more common chords in
those genres is a [dominant seventh][].

What does this have to do with my site's design? Although I had a font size of
18px for the body text I still needed to decide on sizes for headers and other
site elements. Dominant seventh chords sound beautiful, so I used the notes in
the chord to come up with these sizes.

Here are the sizes I came up with (after rounding off to the nearest pixel):

* Root: 18 pixels
* Major third: 23 pixels
* Perfect fifth: 27 pixels
* Minor seventh: 32 pixels
* Octave: 36 pixels
* Major tenth: 45 pixels

This gave me a variety of sizes to work with.  Here are a few places where
I used them:

* Base font size: root
* `h1` elements: major tenth
* `h2` elements: minor seventh
* `h3` elements: major third
* `h4` elements: root
* "Logo" in the header: major third
* Navigation links: root
* Footer text: perfect fifth (an octave down)

You might notice that I don't use a straight perfect fifth anywhere in the
design.  There are two reasons for this.

First: the perfect fifth and the line height I got from Reader are only two
pixels apart, which would feel dissonant.

Second: the perfect fifth is the most "generic" note in the chord, so
eliminating it doesn't really change the feeling of the dominant seventh at
all.

Once I had my line height and header sizes I had plenty to work on.  I made
images, blockquotes, code blocks, and everything else fit the rhythm. After
that I decided to start playing with some other things.

[dominant seventh]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_seventh_chord

Removing Comments
-----------------

The first thing I did after I got the rhythm of the site down was to remove the
[Disqus][] comments.

I did this for two reasons.  The first and most "practical" reason was that
they simply looked out of place.  It's hard to style content from a third-party
site to look great with the rhythm of the site so I got rid of it altogether.

The second reason is something I've learned from music and dancing: the most
important notes are the ones you *don't* play.

I'm usually pretty busy with full-time and freelance work and don't have enough
time to properly respond to comments on the site.  Having comments here,
then, is like having calls without responses -- it doesn't work very well.

If someone wants to tell me something they can easily find me on
[Twitter][twsl] and talk to me or discuss a post on [Hacker News][].

[Disqus]: http://disqus.com/
[twsl]: {{links.twsl}}
[Hacker News]: http://news.ycombinator.com/

Adding Applause with Flattr
---------------------------

I've started using [Flattr][] to help show my appreciation to people that make
good things on the internet.  Since I was redesigning the site I figured I'd
include Flattr buttons on my blog posts.

One reason was simple: it lets people give me money for the things I write.
Another reason is a bit more altruistic: if more people see Flattr buttons
around the web more people will sign up and help out creators.

I like to think of Flattr as applause at a jazz show or a dance.  It doesn't
really contribute anything to the conversation but it *does* let you easily
show your appreciaton.

The worst part of this was going through all my old blog posts and submitting
them to Flattr.

[Flattr]: http://flattr.com/

Printing Nicely with Print Links
--------------------------------

This is something that my old site also had but I never really talked about
(except on [Forrst][]).

If you print one of my site's pages you'll notice that any links inside
a paragraph of content will show up in a list after the paragraph.  I think
this makes it easier to refer to a printed copy because you can type in the
URLs without having to visit my site again.

To do this I use [a little bit of Javascript][printjs].  I *could* put the URLs
directly after the links using just CSS, but I think that breaks up the content
and makes it harder to read.

[Forrst]: http://forrst.com/
[printjs]: http://bitbucket.org/sjl/stevelosh/src/tip/media/js/print.js

Showing Context with Scrolly Headers
------------------------------------

The last trick I pulled out of my sleeve was the "scrolly headers" to the left
of the content, which you've probably already noticed.

I tend to write fairly long blog posts and I think about their structure quite
a bit.  Now that I'm using a much larger font I feel that it's too easy to get
lost while reading them. If you switch away from the page for a bit and come
back you might not remember where you were.

To help fix this I wrote a bit of Javascript to display the top-level headers
of post content to the left of the content.  I think this might help people
keep their place more easily.

Influences and Goals
--------------------

While redesigning I had two main influences in mind:
[Eivind Uggedal's site][uggedal] and [Simon Hørup Eskildsen's site][sirupsen].
I hope they don't mind that I took a lot of elements from their designs to make
my own.

As I was making the new site I had a very simple goal: "make sure no one ever
wants to use Safari Reader on my site."

The design isn't particularly memorable (hell, it pretty much looks like you
just used Safari Reader), but I don't think that's a problem.  I'm not
a designer so I don't want my site to be remembered for its design. I want it
to be remembered for the content, so I aimed for a design that highlights that
content and gets out of the way.

If you have comments, questions, or suggestions feel free to find me on
[Twitter][twsl].

[uggedal]: http://uggedal.com/
[sirupsen]: http://sirupsen.com/

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