Redesign Thoughts

I’ve been kicking around a redesign for some time. By kicking around I mean “I’d like to do that” but making no other progress besides that. I’ve done a couple of updates over the years. Made a small adjustment with the blog boxes, and added view-transitions but I haven’t done a full on redesign in some time.

I’m a little stuck on where to go with it. I know a couple of things. I don’t want my face on it. That’s not important to me. I get why others do it, but it’s not for me. I’d like to reflect a different era of computing. I really love when folks make “old” looking sites. I think that’s a fun touch but I don’t want it to be distracting from actually reading the content. I’m thinking something around the 2010-2011 era. Most mobile sites were m-dots, desktops had some personality, and I think it would be fun to try and get around some of the constraints of the mobile viewport. I fear that it might look “dated” in a way that’s not clearly picked up on but that could be its own challenge too. I’m looking at some old sites and seeing a few trends.

MajorNelson.com was a site I visited a lot growing up. Here we have a 2 column layout. Image on the background. Rounded corners. Pretty blog-y layout. The mirrored logo really represents that time.

How about Xbox.com? Similar deal. Background image, one container element. This looks slightly more modern than the MajorNelson.com example. Squared off corners, pretty standard navigation. You can see modern web UI in this without squinting too hard.

Bungie.net. So no background image here, but a gradient. I actually like this as a solve more than a background image. Scaling on mobile would be a pain. The layout of the container has a lot going on and there is a carousel up top so I think you lose some visual hierarchy here. The navigation looks a lot like Xbox.com.

Keeping it in the Microsoft family, how about Microsoft.com? This one probably looks the most dated with the “button” style navigation. Again I like the gradient background. I could also see a world where the top 3 images are like the thumbnails for most recent blogs.

So where I’m landing on this is it probably makes sense to do a container on a gradient. Can implement a dark and light mode that way. Maybe some ever so slightly rounded corners. I think the drop shadows and the button nav are probably too much for my taste but I could see a direction with those.

So these are just small things I’m noticing. Not entirely sure I’ll go that way but just something I’m thinking about.