mDuo13

It's been just over 5 years since this site's last overhaul, and once again much has changed in that interval. Unlike last time, those events have been catalogued on this very blog, although as always I am not consistent enough in posting. Pleasantly, I find that things here in the world wide web are changing much more rapidly now, and generally for the better. Looking back, I have a great respect for the forces prompting the modern web revolution. Back in 2008 when I last redesigned the site, standards advocates and better browsers had finally ousted the hated tyrant from power, and the concept of a 'smart phone' was barely starting to take hold. HTML5 was a giant soup of diffuse elements trying to consolidate themselves into a standard. The web was slowly crawling out of a dark age.

Thank goodness things have changed.

Many of the changes to this site would have been possible even then — new colors, shapes and sizes, textures — and many things about this site have not changed at all. (The underlying architecture remains almost identical.) Some changes are merely tweaks to account for the passing of years. But there are a few things I'm glad to know the new site brings because they are new:

• Obviously, web fonts, using @font-face make a big difference in how the site looks. Using the magic of modern browsers, I can send you copies of Cantarell, Goudy Bookletter 1911, and Trypewriter, and command your browser to speak in those tongues. Are they necessary? No, probably not, but they immediately make the site feel more modern for so little effort.
• Breakpoints, using @media queries, mean that the site looks and works better in screens and windows of different sizes and shapes. There was a time when designing for mobile, or really any devices that weren't proper PCs, was a luxury only professionals could afford. No more.
• And many more small things, like being able to use display: inline-block so my image gallery displays in clean rows and columns, or adding a border-radius to some blocks for kicks.

The old web was full of frustrations and things that just couldn't be done within reason. The modern web isn't perfect, but it has so many more answers and far fewer questions. It's a good time to be a web designer, and I'm glad I took the time to redo my site. Let me know in the comments if you like it or not, and definitely fill me in if anything seems odd and broken. There's a lot of legacy in this site now, and something's bound to be broken. But in the mean time... enjoy. And I promise I'll post more content. For a while at least.