Softening The Edges

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the new design language for my website. Post may be overgenerous - looking back, it reads more like a stream of consciousness! 

I think it's incredibly important to at least have some kind of design language. It keeps everything looking clean, neat, and tidy, and brings a sense of cohesiveness which would otherwise be lacking. 

One of my key focus areas after this redesign is to "soften the edges" - both literally and metaphorically. For example, the border-radius property has increased from 10px to 15px. A subtle, but nonetheless noticeable, difference. Core "action" buttons have become entirely rounded, and instead of a border flashing into focus when you hover over them, they slowly fade to a slightly lower brightness. This still feels snappy and quick, but also feels a lot calmer, and smoother. "Softened". 

Removing the hard black border, and increasing the border radius makes the whole thing feel a lot cleaner. Hard black lines are useful, but they break the website up into fragments - stripping them out one by one helps to unify every page and section of the site into one!

And that's what I'm loving so far about this new iteration of the site - it's allowed me to rebuild small chunks of the site, and introduce new features, all of which can share a style and codebase, so implementing ideas like these is far, far easier.

Too many sites now rely on complicated JavaScript, or simply forgo animation altogether. I feel I've managed to build a more friendly, chilled style for this site - a style of which I'm actually very proud! 

I sometimes worry about this very iterative approach I take to things - I release half-baked designs, and keep tweaking them until they work. Ideally I'd do all of this on a non-public website, but the stakes are so much lower here that it makes sense for this to be a site I play around with.