Last weekend I started putting together a new theme for here. It was a pretty big design departure from my usual blog style, since I decided to splash out on some stock imagery to put something incredibly nice together. There’s only so much a designer can put together without having access to a decent stock repository. The initial mockups felt nice to work with initially, but there came a point (after playing around with blending modes for a coffee stain layer for the second hour) where I became frustrated and scrapped the whole thing. It looked like this:

I had a plan B, and it’s what you’re looking squinting at right now. It’s been inspired by all sorts of great grid based designs I’ve been exposed to over the past few weeks.

I come from a multimedia background – the creative information technology jerks – and any graphic design lecturers I’ve come across have always tried to hammer home the importance of grid based design. Grid-based design has been around for eons, particularly for desktop publishing. There’s been a resurgence in interest amongst web designers over the past few years, Khoi Vin being the technique’s current poster child in terms of web design. Make no mistake about it, though – grid based design for the web has always been around. It’s one of those common sense things which people have been applying to designs subconsciously for years – the principle just becomes more interesting with research and analysis.

The design is far from finished – I’ve added hardly any polish whatsoever so far. I’ll refine it more over the coming days.