Restyling viralata.net

Viralata.net’s previous white and gray design is no more. I got rid of it because I was getting tired of it, because it looked too web-like, and because I wanted to experiment with web typography. It’s still pretty minimalist but it’s also more textured: there’s a tiled background and a basic serif font working together to create richer and fuller looking pages than with the previous black sans-serif on plain white background. That’s partly what I mean when I say that I wanted something that wasn’t so web-like. I wanted to capture the feel of a printed paper page.

The default font size is much larger (12 points) than usual and the traditional blue and purple links have been replaced by a dark red (#a60000) and a dark gray (#333333). Playing with link colors is not something I would normally do. But since this is my personal site I can relax a bit and ignore the more conservative guidelines for good web design. I have nothing to sell on viralata.net and the site is small enough that I don’t expect anyone to feel lost and curse me for not playing by the rules.

The more unusual decision for me was to work with fixed point sizes, especially for fonts. While this goes against my normal preference for relative units, I figured that, once again, this being a personal site, I could bend the rules. Firefox and Opera are both able to display this new design at greater or smaller font sizes; I imagine that Safari can too. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer cannot but I can’t say that I care.

Using fixed point sizes helped me gain some control over the structure of the page. I have tried to play that element up by paying special attention to the space between lines, paragraphs and headers. I further tried to control the color of the page by redefining the strong and b tags not as indicators for bold weight but as red “ink.” I hope that I was able that way to create a contrast without disrupting the unity of the textblock.