When I started Daneomatic I promised myself that I would never attempt to “design” it, as the focus here is supposed to be on “writing.” And “swearing,” if you will. But certainly not “designing.”
I had also promised myself I would call it Dane-O-Matic, but I quickly realized that I was far too lazy to go through all the work to type it that way. Geez, two hyphens, three shift keys? You’d think I wanted to pull a muscle while trying to spell it out. Thus, in the continuing interest of pragmatism and efficiency, Dane-O-Matic became Daneomatic. I estimate that I can type it at least ten times faster.
Faster than your mom, that is.
Anywho, as lovely as the default theme of WordPress is, and for how many blogs out there who must be using the exact same theme for many the same reasons as I, it was really starting to grate on me. The design was too narrow, too tight, the letters too small. I wanted something mo’ open, mo’ bigga, mo’ printy in nature. And so I cobbled this together.
The advantages are two-fold. First, I feel less cramped by my canvas. Second (and far more important), you can now freely browse this site and pretend you’re looking at something far more reputable, like the NYTimes.com or something!
Things might could be kinda broken in a few terrible web browsers. I tested this design in all the worthwhile browsers I could think of (Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera), as well as a few worthless ones (IE 7, IE 6) and everything works fine. Not great, not awesome, but fine. Yes, there are a number of whitespace inconsistencies, as well as some leftover default WordPress silliness that I find to be quite… silly. If I find something in the design that will literally cause people to die if it isn’t fixed, I will probably address it. If not, I shrug.
I’ll probably continue to tweak and massage this beast over the next couple weeks, so for the time being my only advice is to hang onto something. If all else fails there’s always the newsfeed, a syndication technology that stands to undermine the work of web designers everywhere.
And in all honesty, I’m perfectly okay with that.