As some of you may have noticed, over the past couple of days I have been testing (on and off) a new redesign for design.Principles. Well, the day has come to finally let ‘er loose on Interwebs. The look is a bit of a change from the most recent design. The content is structured rather similarly to how it used to be and I’ve brought elements and features back from previous iterations of the site.

A number of folks really liked that last layout, as did I, but like many designers out there, I often grow tired of how my own site’s after a period of time. For me, that’s usually just a matter of weeks. For the last iteration of this site, I stuck with it longer than I wanted to, just to see if I could. I lasted much longer than I expected.

The Old

Long time visitors to the site will see immediately that I’ve brought back two items from past iterations of the site — the darker background colors and the CSS site showcase. The dark colors are back simply because I missed them too much. They went the way of the Dodo as an attempt to tie design.Principles into my portfolio site. That didn’t seem to really have an affect on sales so it’s time to break it off once again.

I originally abandoned the site showcase portion of the site some time ago. After several attempts at it’s presentation, it was at one point a difficult-to-update flash movie that was a maintenance nightmare. Now that I’ve got it set up in a way that makes it super simple to update, I am excited to have it back on the site.

The New

There are a couple of new features on the site. Yes, it’s got a fixed width optimized for 1024×768 browser sizes. The site’s statistics drive this one to the forefront of things to change for the redesign. I was going to set it up with a more fluid layout, but with well over 80% of the site’s visitors using a screen resolution above 1024 in width, I saw no reason to continue along that route. For those few of you on smaller resolutions, I still love you.

Many of the posts on past iterations of the site were mostly just a quick hit to highlight other articles, without much commentary on my part. So to help readers, and myself, I’ve broken those types of posts out to their own section under the “Elsewhere” headline. It’s got it’s own feed as well so if that’s all you want to be updated on, here you go. As far as the main article section goes, I am going to take a huge step forward in providing more original content including work experiences, experiments, and opinion pieces on what’s going on in the design world. I don’t have any topics lined up at the moment, but I have a feeling I’ll find plenty to ramble on about.

Enough Already

Alright then, enough of the background and explanations. I hope you enjoy the new site design and organization. Please let me know what you think — your feedback is invaluable to me. In fact several of you had some great suggestions and bug notices that I incorporated in that last redesign process.