I am extremely proud to unveil the newest incarnation of Nick Heer.com. Many, many hours of work have gone into this, and I’d like to touch briefly on just a few of the redesign rationales.

The previous generation layout (linked at left) was a curious one for me. I rather liked the interplay of the light grey and dark red, but I found it to be lacking some sort of soul, some personality. It also looked dated, with the use of more basic typography and simpler lines.

The object of the new design was to add some personality while still making it look very much my own. I wanted to use some more interesting typography and use brighter colours to make it feel lighter and more fresh. Lastly, the content needed to be of the highest priority, and the most visible part. I was afraid of over-designing it, so I kept things simple and clean.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, I fell in love with magazine-style designs, which offer a great balance between clean lines and layouts, yet still manage to keep the site interesting. In order to keep things elegant, the content is presented in a simple dark text over a light background, but this left me longing for colour. The image at the top of the home page solves that – it’s directly related to the most recent article. It adds a splash of colour and helps guide the eye down the page.

In order to improve the website’s typography, I needed a wider palette than the dozen (or so) web-safe fonts. I turned to a wonderful piece of Javascript called Cufon. Unlike sIFR, Cufon doesn’t use Flash, which means that it’s mobile browser friendly. It uses Javascript, which keeps it lightweight and makes it really simple to implement rich typography.

I’m really pleased with this redesign, and I hope you like it too. Check out the brand-new Goodies page, which has some all-new content, in addition to adopting the new look.