Serifs sucks! Sans Serif fonts forever! (Other then that, looks nice :))

You’re a rebel! ZOMG! As I type in this comment there are no serifs! !!!

As always, the level of discourse here is unsurpassed.

I like the serifs, but I think I liked the photos more. Of course, it’s not necessarily an either-or thing… the new design looks good, at any rate. :-)

I don’t mind the minimalistic design, but the photos were a good touch, made the site less sterile.

I liked the photos, too. I thought they were cropped in real time? Why couldn’t you change the width if you needed something different?

I used a script to create random 720×170 crops, but then I manually weeded out the uninteresting results. It’s definitely not feasible to do it in real time, especially since I want a liquid layout.

It sounds like everyone liked the photos though, so I’ll see if I can come up with a way to bring them back somehow.

minimalistic is one thing, but this is really really really minimalistic. i’m on the fence about the new design, it’s too bare for my likings—when i first loaded the page, i thought there was something wrong with your css; because the page looks like one where the css is bad and nothing is laid out/colored correctly.

web 1.0 is the new 2.0

Actually this is web 3.0. It only looks like web 1.0 because you don’t have your 3D glasses on.

As a suggestion, perhaps you could add a max-width property to your body text column, set in ems? Super-long lines can be more difficult to read, and make paragraphs look awkward. ~66 characters per line is a traditional typographical standard, though print publications commonly range from 50-80 CPL.

Jakob Nielsen would be proud.

I agree with the rest here. The old look was minimalistic, this is barren. Serif font is an eyesore (personal opinion of course). What I would like to know is your rationale behind moving to a fluid look. I have found that fixed layouts provide predictability and maximum control. You have more experience than I in interwebs designing, so this is a legitimate curiosity. Please elaborate.

Thanks.

I’m not sure I’d call the old look minimalistic. There were several reasons for the change to a simpler design, fluid layout, and seriffed fonts:

1. I’m not a designer. I was tired of the old look of the site, but I didn’t want to design a new look. That led me down the path of creating a look that was as minimal as possible and thus very easy to maintain and improve upon.
2. I wanted to put more emphasis on the content and less on the extraneous stuff like the header and sidebar. Thus the header photos (which were pretty to look at, but distracting) had to go.
3. I wanted to make the content easier to read and I wanted to increase the use of aesthetically pleasing typography to make up for the other design elements on the site that were being removed. Thus the switch to a larger, seriffed font, which I personally find both more readable and more attractive.
4. The switch to a semi-fluid layout was mainly to increase readability by giving the reader more control over line lengths. I personally like shorter lines, but some people prefer longer lines and shorter paragraphs. Many people complained about the old fixed layout (naturally, those people haven’t bothered commenting on the new layout).

Part of the beauty of this minimalistic design is that it’s a blank slate. I’ve already made several tweaks, and I plan to continue tweaking it as I think of improvements. While I don’t enjoy creating a complex design from scratch, I do enjoy building a design slowly and gradually over time, through many iterations.

This site is both a hobby and a testing ground for me, and starting over from a blank slate was exactly what I needed in order to keep myself interested.