Monday, September 24, 2001
Having spent nearly six hours of the past twenty-four tweaking the layout of Acorro.com, I’m super-tuned and in hyper-design mode. I redesigned this page in the lean style that my other pages on this site have. It makes more sense, I think, and I find the simple layouts somehow much more expressive that the more complicated. I have a long history of enjoying the works of van Doesburg, Mondrian, and the de Stijl Krew, so it all makes sense, I suppose.
Anyway, you might be surprised how long it takes to nail down a color scheme that satisfies me. This new Breakfast color scheme (and layout, as well, but primarily color scheme) took about an hour to reach. I began with the old redding-orange-on-black page that had the funky orange title logotype at the top. After some unsucessful futzing with cascading stylesheets, yellow-shades on white, lavender text on a dark red background (yikes!), and such I ended up with the scheme you see right now, the Wired-Magazine-circa-1996-brand jolting pink + black + CRT green combination that might someday during the next decade come to be associated with the “glam-days” of the Internet (for those people who will be working hard to justify and mythify the four years of their lives they spent in front of radiant screens with a totally inappropriate comparison to the sexy, coked-out death-of-disco days of the last generation). My head just turned itself inside-out. Um. Anyway.
Acorro.com, on the other hand, is professional shit; design that needs to be quite right and appropriate before it gets put on the web for use. I made the basic colors and layout several weeks ago, so I had that to build on, and so my six hours this weekend essentially went into laying out a table with search options, fixing up a header and footer, and reformatting the “About Acorro.com” text. Is this rediculous? I don’t know.
