Left Justified

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| August 7, 2004 | Category: General

After 3 pre-launch total redesigns and many caffiene fuelled nights, I’m proud to present Left Justified. My first place I can call home on the web - and it’s not even a geocities site!

Big, Bright & Personal

As a web designer, designing your own site can quickly develop into a black hole of second guessing and creeping elegance; it can always be faster, brighter, stronger, lighter… But you have to stop sometime, or surely you’ll go mad.

Part of my city dweller's garden Knowing this, I dove in unprepared and almost totally without direction, finding inspiration in anything around me - most of which lead outdoors to my bonsai collection, as well as the rainforest of my childhood home, Tamborine Mountain. The prerequisite was that the site’s imagery had to mean more to me than just stock. From the aforementioned foliage disposition, to the NIN inspired menu font, Left Justified’s design reads like an overview of my influences.

The Hard Choices

Elements of early design concepts Fixed, fluid, elastic… What choice do you make for your public face as a designer? Play the responsible role, building a highly flexible solution or find solace in the pixel certainty of a fixed-width layout. Shady support for maximum and minimum width/height control, combined with less than average support of a quality transparent image format left me with one reliable choice — a fixed width design.

Working with Word Press

I’d like to say that it was a thorough investigation of possibilities that led to me making WordPress my CMS of choice, but I can’t lie.
It was the interface.

Shopping for a CMS is akin to shopping for a car — there’s no point buying something that looks great but is horrid to drive. WordPress’ elegant admin interface satisfied me as one I could use for years to come. Once I’d made this choice, I wrote up two lists.

  1. Features I wanted
  2. Available plug-ins

Weather Icons One feature that was on neither list but fit in perfectly with the theme of the site was Jeremiah’s Weather Icon. After re-clothing the output in a brand new coat of semantic mark-up and tweaking a few of the included images it looked like it was always meant to be there. The changes are nothing special, but they do provide a good reminder that standards compliant code is not inherently lean and meaningful, it is merely an array of tools, each with their individual roles.

Old Code:

  1. <li id='weather'>Brisbane, Australia
  2. <ul>
  3. <li>
  4. <img src='/images/wicons/0cloud.png' alt='Current Conditions'/>
  5. </li>
  6. <li>
  7. <span class='weather_title'>Temperature</span>
  8. <span class='weather_info'>18&deg;C</span>
  9. </li>
  10. <li>
  11. <span class='weather_title'>Humidity</span>
  12. <span class='weather_info'>32%</span>
  13. </li>
  14. <li>
  15. <span class='weather_title'>Wind</span>
  16. <span class='weather_info'>NE at 15 km/h</span>
  17. </li>
  18. <li>
  19. <span class='weather_title'>Clouds</span>
  20. <span class='weather_info'>clear skies</span>
  21. </li>
  22. </ul>
  23. </li>

New Code:

  1. <h3>Brisbane, Australia</h3>
  2. <img src='/images/wicons/0cloud.png' alt='clear skies'/>
  3. <dl id='weatherlist'>
  4. <dt>Temp:</dt>
  5. <dd>18&deg;C</dd>
  6. <dt>Humidity:</dt>
  7. <dd>32%</dd>
  8. <dt>Wind:</dt>
  9. <dd>NE at 15 km/h</dd>
  10. </dl>

Weather.php
From 497 characters down to 199, while keeping all the original styling hooks and providing the icon with something all images need - meaningful alt text.

This brings me to an item from my list of required features: displaying and storing code. Not long after this design left the boundless environment of Photoshop, Dunstan redesigned - featuring an ideal method of storing and displaying code. His gracious publication of the source led to the almost immediate development of a Word Press plug-in by David House, a smart young brit who helped yours truly take his first serious steps in CSS.

All the pieces have come together to make what I hope is more than just another run-of-the-mill weblog, but one crucial element will decide - content.

  1. 1
    Ma said:

    Wonderful work!!
    Do you have recollections of being on this earth before? If so who were your parents.
    Have you thought of taking up writing full time.

    Comment posted on:
    6:31 pm, 9th of Aug 2004
  2. 2
    Andrew said:

    Oh yeah… I remember you guys now! How ya goin’ Ma? :-D

    Comment posted on:
    8:03 pm, 9th of Aug 2004
  3. 3
    wow factor - Authors, designers and resources said:

    […] on. Shock Media Studios ..will develop a solid website design and development strategy. Left Justified the personal site of Andrew Krespanis of Bris […]

    Comment posted on:
    8:15 am, 10th of Feb 2005
  4. 4
    Swami Neelamber said:

    Hi Andrew, sitting at the bottom of your Gaussian Blurred page (http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/08/07/blurred/) is this:

    Warning: mysql_free_result(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/httpd/vhosts/leftjustified.net/httpdocs/post.php on line 172

    Just though you may like to know … No big deal I realise, but it’s a slight distraction from your absolutely Brilliant Web site design!

    At almost three (!) times your age, I’m totally in awe of your abilities and always check any Andrew Krespanis messages I see on the myriad WSG incoming.

    Keep up the good work!

    Cheers

    Swami Neelamber

    Comment posted on:
    3:19 pm, 2nd of Aug 2005

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