more of the same

To mark this blog's fourth anniversary, I gave it a bit of a refresh, both visual and technical. It now lives on https like all proper websites do nowadays, and is on the latest version of the ghost publishing software (I hadn't upgraded for over a year due to technical limitations on the old host). This makes possible an index by article title as well as by tag.

Without changing the overall theme, I polished up many aspects of the graphic design including the navigation, social sharing buttons and read more/paging links. I gave some posts animated thumbnails on the overview, but decided not to have anything animated on the article pages themselves, to avoid distracting from the text. My focus has always been, and remains, on the words.

But I also designed a logo for the blog. Logotypes aren't just for selling things and brand recognition; they can also give you cues about what you're looking at. Besides, I've always found designing things fun. In primary school I designed so many machines that I had to be ordered to draw something different in drawing class. I'm not a properly trained graphic designer, but I did do a lot of web design 10-20 years ago, and read some books on design then. (I designed my first web page, including a colourful tiled background, in 1995.) So I'm more of a well-informed amateur. I tinker with things until I'm happy with them, and I enjoy the process.

Hopefully, this logo gives cues that “this is something quirky, made by a well-informed amateur”. That's what this blog is, and what's to come will continue in the same vein.