Daily misery

Let me share some of my experiences while working on Daily Misery’s latest design.

• Font-weight:bold is ugly. For some reasons bolded text does not work for me, be it Arial or Verdana or helvetica. I guess I just love the sharpness of clean types and prefer to increase the size of the type to get the ‘bold’ effect in many cases.
• Don’t rush, the domain is yours. Take one year to design and play with it if you have to, which is exactly what i intend to do this time.
• Keep tweaking until it looks right for you no matter how many times you look at it on different screen resolutions, browsers and platforms. Your own blog/web site is the only place you can fulfill that retarded, perfectionist and pixel perfect itches of yours. Keep doing it until you get it right. Scrap the whole thing and start from scratch if you have to. This is something you can’t do on any given client projects.
• Enjoy the process for your own sake. If you can’t feel the joy while working on your own site, then maybe web development isnt exactly the right thing to build your career upon.
• Relax and chill. If you’re having one of those bad day at design-ville where nothing seems to click in photoshop or IE css bug is hitting your nerve, take a break. Go walk your dog or seat back and read your news feed. Make yourself a coffee. Have sex.

And last piece of advice, think about your users. Dont design or add stuff just for the sake of, uhm well, design and add stuff. Ajax is cool, live search is sleek - everyone wants one. Does it really helps your users? Dont know? Ask. If you want to put 10 links to external js scripts in your header, that’s fine with me. But at least know how the codes work, dont just copy and paste. There’s nothing worse than using an entire Dojo or Prototype library just to implement that hide/show content on your sidebar. By the way, all those sleek js animation you saw mushrooming around the webspehere lately (like moo.fx, scriptalous effects….) - they are not ajax (but they are cool nevertheless, especially moo.fx, 3kb baby!).

Ok last advice, for real! Dont be afraid to go against the flow. This latest design of Daily Misery pretty much turns its back on those 2006’s predictions by many well known web developers/designers out there. Big font? nope! Rounded corners? Nope! Hinted box? Nope! Fluid layout? Nope!

Gradient and silkscreen still work wonders for me. I am all about ol’ school.

Happy coding!