My own little responsive part of the web.
If you’re reading this, you’re experiencing my site first-hand. Which means there isn’t a lot to say other than to run down some design and technical notes for those of you interested pixel-shifting.
The latest reincarnation of my personal site is a flat site, with hand-coded HTML and SASS/CSS with a little bit of JavaScript thrown in to lazy-load some of the heavily compressed but still heavyweight screenshot images. The site is generated using Jekyll, the Ruby static site generator. The development environment and build process is handled by a combination of Bundle and Guard, which I have found to be a hell of a lot more straightforward than Node-based compatriots such as Grunt. I’m sure there's a pretty big tradeoff in terms of power and flexibility but this is a static, personal site so I‘m taking a simple route—‘nuff said.
Design wise, I’ve gone for a lightweight, type-heavy, and image-light design, using color, strong typographical hierachy and a hint of consistent decoration with a triangular motif. The gradients are there because, well, who doesn’t like a nice gradient? That and iOS7 has brought them in from Siberia and made their use almost acceptable again.
The whole site is of course responsive across screen sizes, uses REMs for sizing and purposely doesn’t even think about the time-sink of faffing and asset production around “Retina images”. Every graphic is sized between 1.5x and 2x and delivered to every device, just like the web intended. I don’t think the world really needs many more social sharing or Like buttons either, so I‘ve kept all that stuff to a minimum too.
I hope you’re enjoying poking around the site. If you spot anything wrong, broken or just plain bad, let me know.