Hello world

Jun 22, 2021 3 min read

Hello world

All my great (and terrible) ideas start spontaneous. I stumbled upon an article that explains why Designers should write.

Don't expect the articles to be very profound. I will just share insights into my workflow. You will see design related stuff such as font/tool recommendations, UI/UX tips, etc. Maybe I will throw in some reviews here and there. Only time will tell.

Design

So to test out my writing skills, here's perfect opportunity, another website redesign. Redesign again?! It's a known fact that I update my site more often than I do my references ;)

Throughout the years I had single page designs with exception of projects using page transition to open details. I wanted to try writing blog, so I went with classic layout.

My portfolio was always as minimal as possible with a large focus on clean typography, subtle animations and huge whitespace. I also tend to change some elements occasionally. So this might not be the final look.

I found very clean Satoshi and used it for headlines. It's free and variable, which is great for different weight variations. To pair with Satoshi, I've used Kumbh Sans, which is also free.

Development

The idea was to get something up and running just like the current site, but a bit more dynamic. I just wanted pages and posts to be in subfolders with some basic markdown done in *md files.

What is also new is that I control the overall zoom level with just one value, which is font base size, defined for each viewport. That means all image sizes, paddings and margins are also controlled by that value. Pretty cool, eh? For grid I went with default bootstrap-grid.

In vars.scss file I keep my color scheme for light and dark, font names, font sizes (rem), spacing (em), animation speeds, shadows, borders. etc.

Default theme gets loaded based on the OS settings via prefers-color-scheme. If there's no match it loads light as default. You can also manually toggle the theme and it will get saved in local storage.

I'm also aware of things like next.js, hugo or jekyll. The amount of work just isn't worth the time I would spent learning as I would have no projects to ever use it on. Design is still one of my main income source and frontend is only nifty when I'm doing some freelance projects. So, I'm sticking with PHP.

Eww, PHP?

Who is still using PHP in 2021? Well, according to the internet, a lot of sites. While browsing github, I've found a microblogging system called Nicholas. I did slight modification so that I can create custom page templates such as projects, about and contact.

Next steps

Soon, I will post article about my Strava, Last.fm and Trakt.tv PHP script for getting the data, just like I do on my About page.

If you have feedback or want to correct my grammar, feel free to reach out to me!

Last modified on Jun 25, 2021