After 2 months of planning and a few delays, Adii finally changed his look sporting a new wordpress design.
The theme’s got a lot of new updates and visual improvements over the previous design.
From the new color scheme, to the custom twitter logo, you can tell Adii put a lot of attention into details in the new design.
Comparisons from the old look to the new look:
Design:
Major design changes have been made to the entire layout making it a new breed and not just a revision. Adii now features a three column layout on the homepage with a featured section highlighting his latest and greatest article. Browsing into inner pages in the blog changes the layout into two columns. He also incorporated his mascot that was seen in many advertisement campaigns he ran on multiple blogs and websites.
For the sidebar, Adii brought the category section up, displaying it in a tag like generated fashion.
Underneath, he also changed the advertisement section, bringing the ad slots down in numbers and adding rotation functionality to switch between the 8 different sponsors being displayed.
Small Adii Bits
I’m going to assume that this section is where Adii can post his asides category. He previously talked about having a section away from the main content where he’d write about personal thoughts and whatnot.
New additions to the blog are social media buttons below each blog post. These buttons give quick and easy submission to popular social websites like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.ici.ous and more.
More things like an rss feed count and Gravatar support have also been added to the blog.
After all these changes, Adii still managed to keep one of his previous theme’s major highlight, the Polaroid pictures.
In conclusion:
Overall, I think Adii did a great job on the redesign compared to his previous theme.
While its a big step forward, I think he might need to make a few more minor improvements like making some adjustments to the background texture of the layout. Adii has gone with something similar to the “wood” trend designers have been doing lately which looks great if done correctly, but the contrast is a little too heavy. Another thing would be to get more creative with typography. I’d play around with the fonts on the blog.
Ptah, thanks for mentioning the new design, as well as adding some constructive criticism. I will definitely take a look at the design in the week or so and tweak a few things to get the most from the design.
What would you suggest with regards to the typography?
@Adii: As far as typography changes, I’m thinking that with that texture on the background of the body content, you should go for all around sans-serif font. Using a serif font makes it just a wee bit harder to read your content.
Another change to consider would be upping the font size on those three lines of text on the left side of your homepage. The title, date, and category seemed to be just a little bit too small. Or just increase the article titles so everything doesn’t look so srunched up you know.
That also applies to when your reading on the single.php page.
There’s a lot more room to increase the font size of the articles so it stands out.
Lastly, the sidebar links: they’re all white which confuses readers questioning if they are actually text or links. You should differentiate those more for clarity purposes. If you give them both the same color, it’ll be like your telling your readers that your sidebar content is just as important to your main content area and that they should have the same amount of focus. (not a good idea)
… and what’s your idea with the footer? I didn’t get that.