thought process to a redesign

One evening last week, I had updated the photo in the blog banner using this shot. It’s a clever photo Marlin took of me while we were in Seattle. I really like the fact I’m looking at the camera through the small space between the panels that are either tinted blue or red. I think it’s a good analogy for a building political climate in the U.S. that’s more exciting than anything I have seen in my lifetime. But this isn’t an Obama blog … I’m sure there will be plenty of those.

Marlin got all excited because he thought it was the first time I was using one of his photos in the blog banner. I quickly corrected him — I used a Florida Keys sunrise shot he took several years ago as the regular blog banner in versions 3 and 4 of this blog. In fact, I showed him … I have a history page about the designs.

Of course, I started glancing through the history page and realized a few things: I should blog more often; I should redesign; and wholly crap — come February, it will be TEN YEARS since I started blogging. Granted, I was one of the early ones out there on the cutting edge before these online journal/log/diary things became known as “blogs” but still — 10 years!

And so I redesigned — welcome to version 9 of Leather Egg. I’m still cleaning up a few things and haven’t touched the gallery yet, but as I’ve said when introducing previous redesigns, it’s always a work in progress.

UPDATE: I made one of those “I should have known better” mistakes: I didn’t test the design at 1024-pixel screen width. At that common screen size, the banner photo disappeared at the right edge of the page just before the iris of my eye … leaving a spooky white eyeball. I’ve since re-cropped the photo. One of the things about the new design is that it is fluid, functional and legible even up to very wide screen sizes. But I have make sure my banner images work equally well at both narrow and wide screen sizes.