Danny Garcia

Rethinking the Blog

It’s been over a year that Jason Santa Maria’s experimental model for his own personal blog was launched and since then he’s proven that it’s very much possible to take the same approach as seen in magazine art direction and use it online. In short, a static layout is set up for standard blog entries, but for special articles there is the option of linking to a CSS file specifically designed for that post.

Like Jason says, this is nothing new, others like A List Apart, A Brief Message and Dustin Curtis (even his 30-day Flight) follow a similar publishing model and they have all inspired me try to do the same.

Specifically

More than anything it’s a good feeling to call this my own. Some out there might call this a rehash of what Jason’s already achieved, but the main difference between this and anything else out there is what matters most — the content.

I don’t claim to know everything about graphic design or that every article on this site will blow your mind to pieces with exquisite illustrations or the excellent use of the English language but I have always believed in bettering yourself through education and experience. I plan on making this a part of that learning process, as was the case even during the setup of this site.

This is all obviously put together with ExpressionEngine and it uses the 960.gs grid framework so feel free to poke around the code (don’t steal, kids, haha ). I’ve also included the beautiful and free font Aller. It’s imported to your browser using some @font-face wizardry, it’s awesome like that.

What’s Missing?

Many things still need work. Right now some pages don’t link to anywhere and I do plan on adding comments — as soon as I can decide between disqus and EE’s own comment system styling the disqus comments. In the mean time I will be linking to each new post or addition on my Twitter so you can follow the progress and comment through there.

Bring It On!

Over the next few months I’ll be slowly changing things here and there but all in all the focus is set on creating interesting, design-related articles (or at least prettier ones). I’m very excited to see where this project goes and how it changes the way we look at (and think about) traditional blog publishing.

Here’s to making the web a better place!