Creative Curio Critique?

[LaurenMarie]

Hi guys! I miss interacting with you all here! I've been really busy with my blog redesign and I was wondering if you would check it out and let me know if you find any problems. I'm still working on the finer details (like the content in the sidebar and footer, and yes, I know my tag links don't work).

Creative Curio » Learn, discuss and explore the realm of Graphic Design.

If you have any suggestions about what kind of content to include in the sidebar or footer areas, I would love to hear them.

Feel free to comment in this thread or on the blog and thanks in advance! Looking forward to your feedback...

[tommylogic]

looks GREAT !!! I actually really like how different the design is!! I wouldn't personally care to use it, but the details are definitely there. The watercolor effect is ace. I had a friend looking for something almost just like this (if you wanted to release it as a Theme )

Anyhow, I noticed your "I Learn From" section.. where I saw David Airey listed. You won't be going wrong there I promise that. His designs are superb.

Anyhow that said, I would really do your best to get these details sorted out. Believe me I feel your pain when it comes to trying to keep any dynamic CMS site validated, something about the markup to the database and back will play funny tricks on your original code... BUT:

CSS Validation: ONE Error on your h5... easy enough

Markup Validation: FAILED 38 Errors

[LaurenMarie]

Tell your friend not to hold his/her breath. It's an exclusive Creative Curio theme for now! I had to do too much hard coding for it to be very versatile for someone else to use. But thanks for the compliments. I'm finding quite a few people are saying "Not my favorite style," but go on to say they can tell a lot of thought went into it. I really appreciate that people can see that, even if it's not an attractive style to them personally.

Yeah, David is a great designer and really nice guy, too! I've been reading his blog since the beginning of my blogging days (May 07).

Oh thanks for the heads up about the h5. Heh. I suppose there are far worse things!

Eeek, 38 errors with the markup... well, you can get carried away trying to validate for ONE checker, but I'll take a look at that report.

[tommylogic]

Yeah, I found a particular module or two and a couple little quirks in mine that caused some chaos. I was typing in the CMS's editor using "&" and it encoded them all as unsescaped ampersands (instead of & in the html). Even going in and manually entering it in proper as html, it converted them all back to the wrong way after I saved the doc. That created a cascading affect of about 4 errors per "&"... times that by 332 documents!!! I now realize I have to keep on eye on posts, needless to say.

And I was kinda kidding about the "Theme"... I saw it wsa quite a bit of detail into it.

[zumojuice]

The design is great. Not my personal cup of tea perhaps, but then you come for the articles. It will be interesting to see if you're right about typography sites being the next big thing. If they are, I see a lot more designers getting involved with developers, since much of the web design typography currently around the internet is awful...

[james]

Looks fantastic - I saw an entry about this redesign on your RSS feed a while ago, and wondered how it would turn out. Its possibly a bit too 'girly' to appeal to everyone, but i would take nothing away from it, well done

[LaurenMarie]

Zumo, I think there's quite an emergence of good typography. Have you seen this article from I Love Typograhy? John has published 3 others also:
15 Great Examples of Web*Typography | i love typography, the typography blog
15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography. Under the*Bonnet | i love typography, the typography blog
15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography. Part 1 | i love typography, the typography blog

I could spend hours looking at those sites! They are soooo beautiful.

Thanks for your responses, guys. Did you see any browser issues? I think by now I have them all cleared up, but just in case...

[LaurenMarie]

weird. my reply got posted twice. well, deleting this one.

[kip]

All them links and not one mention of EDF !!

[zumojuice]

Lauren, I wasn't saying it didn't exist at all and you're right, it is increasing.

I 've seen the 'I Love T' link before, and agreed, lovely stuff. The fact is though, that over the web as a whole, you're more likely to come over bad typography or people talking about the web 2.0 style than good work. I am not going to get on to the debate of web 2.0, be itr was it is, and that it has a style inherit to it but not part of it.

I think the type work will be much much harder, since there is much less control of web type than print. (ie once you've printed it, it won't change, but with web, a whole host of factors could screw your work as it's seen..)

This touches onto the text/image thing I was talking to Harry about...