Rocketfuelled
Reuben Whitehouse

Blueprint 7.07.08

Bienvenue á Rocketfuelled version ~10 (or something)! So called ‘Blueprint’ because I’m using the very handy, very clever, very slick Blueprint CSS to achieve the overall layout. Blueprint’s very easy to use if you give the enclosed tutorials, code and this intro by Blue Flavor a good read-through first.

So this newer version isn’t really a drastic change from the previous – the general layout is the same, but tighter thanks to Blueprint’s flexible grid.css. I’ve done away with the big background image, bold Helvetica (which I’ve used too much of lately) and the bright yellow in favour of a more relaxed, much simpler usage of colour and typography. It’s kind of a direction which I’ve wanted to take the site in for a while.

The logo’s changed too: I like lightning bolts, and the Hot Air Balloon from back in ’06 wasn’t really working for me anymore. So now we have a nice retro, Lopez-style lightning bolt in a circle. Rock!

Each section of the site has a very similar layout but the overall colours of text, background and links change to suit the particular section’s content more appropriately. The Homepage’s red background is more colourful than the more traditional black-on-white of the Blog which is, however, a lot more readable. The Portfolio has a black background to let the imagery shine out a wee bit more. Perhaps over time I’ll change the homepage colours as I see fit or perhaps even to more appropriately fit the theme of the particular blog article that it’s showing. This open layout could also allow for some more detailed background elements on a per-article basis, if I can muster-up the time and ideas to do such a thing.

Functionally not much has changed but the new CSS should allow for new bits and bobs to be added with a lot more ease. I’d like to bring in some recent Tweets and Flickr’s soon enough. Maybe also bring back that Scrapbook thing that I used to have. Commenting would be good too, no?