{"id":296025,"date":"2010-02-09T01:39:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T06:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artscatter.com\/?p=6647"},"modified":"2010-02-09T01:39:27","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T06:39:27","slug":"art-scatter%e2%80%99s-new-look-we-have-a-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/296025","title":{"rendered":"Art Scatter\u2019s new look: We have a winner"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you may have noticed,<\/strong> here at Art Scatter we\u2019ve been stressing out lately about the way we look. We were feeling \u2026 frumpy<\/em>. We wanted something fresh, something new, and came up with three possible visual themes to replace Artsemerging<\/strong>, the theme we\u2019ve been using since the blog began two years ago.<\/p>\n

\"WikimediaWe asked for your advice, and a lot of you gave it. Thanks<\/strong> to Scatter friends and followers Charles Deemer, LaValle Linn, Charles Noble, Brett Campbell, Cynthia Kirk, Mighty Toy Cannon and others for chipping in with preferences and ideas. Each of the three candidates had its fans, and each had its detractors. I appreciate the energy that all of you put into this. And I appreciate that more than one of you noted that design isn\u2019t why you visit Art Scatter, anyway: You come for the writing and the ideas. Special thanks to LaValle for her warning that Web designs can devour your time and sanity in the middle of the night if you let yourself get too deeply drawn into them: Perish that thought!<\/p>\n

Still, we want the writing and ideas to be displayed well. The decision wasn\u2019t easy. At least one of you listed the eventual choice as his least favorite.<\/p>\n

And the winner is \u2026. Modern<\/strong>, designed by Ulf Pettersson, the design you\u2019re looking at now.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a clean, well-spaced, elegant design, a very professional-looking presentation, and that\u2019s important. Its headlines are understated but big enough to stand out, and they look good running either one or two lines. Its serif type style moves serenely among bold, italic and roman type, making its point at each stop without leaping for your jugular. The type\u2019s a little small in its pull quotes, but they still look good. The design handles splendidly such small but crucial matters as spacing and creating ample windows for inset illustrations: Nothing\u2019s haphazard about it.<\/p>\n

Is it too understated? We\u2019ll see. If it turns out to be, we\u2019ll switch again. Charles Noble touts the advantages of the premium design he chose for his blog Noble Viola<\/a>, and it\u2019s true that paying a little more can add a great deal more flexibility. I like the way that Charles\u2019s blog can highlight several posts at once, for instance, and the way it can add \u201cextras\u201d such as promotional highlights and recent comments and still look crisp and inviting.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent a lot of time inside these three designs, checking them out not just for looks but also for flexibility. When we began this journey I was drawn to the jazzy, stop-the-presses look of Copyblogger<\/strong>. (Mighty Toy Cannon points out its nice retro feel and homage to \u201clegacy media,\u201d meaning newspapers, the world from which both Mr. and Mrs. Scatter emerged). But although I liked its side panel perhaps the best of the lot, it had internal difficulties that made it hard to choose, including, but not limited to, poor spacing for its illustration windows, allowing type to bump right into the pictures.<\/p>\n

In general I prefer serif types to sans serif types, although a good sans serif beats a bad serif. Veryplaintext 3.0<\/strong> has my favorite typeface of any candidate, a distinctive and gorgeously assertive face. But it doesn\u2019t like italic<\/em> very much (what you see isn\u2019t always what you get), and I consider italic type an integral tool in my presentational box. The real deal-buster, though, was its ragged, center-adjusted side panel, which to my eye (and LaValle’s, too!) looks haphazard and uncontained and, well, unprofessional. Too bad.<\/p>\n

So that brings us back to Modern<\/strong>, which has an elegant look and seems the best compromise. Unfortunately, Mrs. Scatter hates it, and I understand her reasons. The blog title is small and pushed far to the right, and that bothers her. I\u2019d prefer its type a little bigger, but its placement doesn\u2019t bother me. She hates all gray boxes \u2013 that\u2019s one of the reasons we defected from Artsemerging, which has a prominent gray screen \u2013 and Modern\u2019s side panel is shaded gray. Plus, the panel’s wide, eating up a lot of space that could go instead to the relatively narrow main column. Like Mrs. Scatter, I\u2019d like the side panel to include links to recent posts and possibly recent comments, and in general to be more flexible. Perhaps I can play around with it a bit and get some of those things to happen.<\/p>\n

I deeply, sincerely hope this design grows on Mrs. Scatter \u2013 believe me, I deeply and sincerely hope this! \u2013 and I hope the design doesn\u2019t prove to be too sedate. I\u2019m convinced that it\u2019s a stylish, visually pleasing design. Time will tell if it\u2019s right for Art Scatter. For now, at least, it\u2019s won the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you may have noticed, here at Art Scatter we\u2019ve been stressing out lately about the way we look. We were feeling \u2026 frumpy. We wanted something fresh, something new, and came up with three possible visual themes to replace Artsemerging, the theme we\u2019ve been using since the blog began two years ago. We asked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5341,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}