For a few weeks, I’ve been trying out new things on the design of this blog. Every day, I visited my site and used the “Inspect Element” option on Safari to tweak a few things, to see if I could refresh its visual style without having to put in too much work.
Until today, I’ve always ended these 5-minute experiments with a thought along the lines of “Nah, let it go, it looks good enough already.” But the seed was planted: it was already too late. So there it is, live. I’ll reuse Jason Kottke’s formula if you want to see it for yourself:
RSS reader folk, you’re going to have to click through to the actual WWW to see these…don’t be scared, you can do it.
I’ve always avoided serif fonts because to me they looked too serious for what I write on this blog. But recently, I’ve warmed to Charter, and even Times New Roman, which somehow doesn’t look like the boring legacy default font it used to be. I’m sure the now ubiquitous presence of Calibri, Segoe UI, San Francisco, Roboto, and even Inter, have something to do with my new perspective on it.
A nice bonus of this new CSS, falling back to serif instead of sans-serif, is that readers without Helvetica Neue on their machines — aka Windows users — won’t risk seeing Arial anymore. You’re welcome.
I also got rid of the meta name="color-scheme" which turned on a “dark mode,” depending on the reader’s display settings. Texts don’t look as good when printed white on black using serif fonts, and I guess most of you read this via your RSS reader anyway, so this extra line of code in the header felt a little overkill.
Another good reason for this spring update is that I now live in a new home with my wife, so I figured that celebrating a new home with a new look for my home on the internet was a good idea.
Moving to our freshly built flat, which we bought 18 months ago, is also the main reason why I’ve been posting so little these last few weeks. Between work — which has been crazy on its own — and the million things to do when moving out, my energy levels were too low to even think about writing something in my spare time. The last four weeks were very intense, but from now on, everything should slowly go back to normal.
The Now page has also been updated accordingly, but I wanted this spring update to have its own entry in the archive.
