I must admit, that was a much longer vacation than I had intended on taking. I didn't sit on my hands though, in addition to changing addresses I've made a number of changes to Sunshocked.com. Take the tour!

The Grid

Having seen Mark Boulton and Khoi Vinh talk about grids at SXSWs and then reading the classic Grid Systems in Graphic Design I couldn't not redesign my site using a grid.

In fact, I'm even maintaining a vertical rhythm as well (busting out some Bringhurst for that). This particular aspect isn't 100% yet, as I'm having a time with borders throwing off my vertical grid, but I'm working on it.

Also worth noting is that I, while these strict grid types often make excessive use of Helvetica, after I did a bit of research I found that Gil Sans is included on every Mac and anyone with Word installed on Windows, so I'm going to use it here. Not everyone will have it, but it's more exciting than Helvetica (and not enough people have Futura).

Colors

I've been thinking about how to embrace wabi-sabi on the web since I began the Stanifesto. How can you create something that weathers and gathers character with age in a digital medium? If you follow that last link, you'll notice that the post is in black & white. That's because all of my posts gradually desaturate with time now, and anything over a year old is grayscale.

Additionally, this site now slowly cycles through color schemes throughout the year. I wrote a particularly clever algorithm that grabs the day of the year and then calculates the color palette from it. That means that if you visit often, you may never notice that the colors are changing but if you only come by once-in-a-while, the site will have entirely different hues. You can blame my switching to locally grown, organic produce for this feature (just like certain fruit, the purple color scheme is only in season for so long so enjoy it while you can). Oh, and transparent PNGs play a large role here.

Goodies

Most popular posts! Recent comments! Contextual footers! Creative Commons license! All sorts of fun for those looking for it. Still to come is a full overworking using microformats and stylesheets that re-arrange content based on the size of your browser window. There are sure to be some bugs, too but I couldn't wait until everything was ready or I'd never come back from vacation.

Speaking of vacation, I'm headed to Black Rock City next week, where I'm going to try to do the unthinkable and somehow continue to blog. We shall see.