Designing the look of this site

Not wanting to redesign this site every year the look had to be interesting enough for me to keep for a couple of years. In my experience I won’t get bored easily with a layout if I use less look-dictating images and colors, and instead letting the content images dictate most of the look. Keeping it open also let’s me change small parts and experiment without affecting the overal look and feel of the site.

Trying to get away from the popular fixed-width 2/3-column layouts, the layout had to be a liquid. I also didn’t want a visible frame around the design and instead let the browserwindow be the frame. So it had to look like the design continues on most sides.

As this site is supposed to show my skills as a webdeveloper, the look had to show both my minimalistic and non-minimalistic skills (if possible).

Enter the Clean to Chaos look

So I came up with a liquid layout that goes from simple/clean on the left, to your standard blog lay-out in the middle, to dirty chaos on the right.

The same can be said of the content. Which goes from a simple introduction on the left, to structured content in the middle, to inspirational chaos on the right (well, it isn’t very chaotic yet, but I have some ideas for this).

By slicing up the columns into a grid it looks less like the average 2/3-column layout.

The design isn’t finished yet. Plans include getting away from the magazine metaphor and creating more interesting images and content for the right column.