Duality

… for the third time.

This redesign has taken so long because it is hard to make progress when my free time is chopped up into tiny pieces. Every time I sit down to design, there’s a bit of start-up time when I’m getting into the flow of designing but not making progress. If my particular chunk of free time is small—and more often than not, it is—all I end up doing is exercising Command-O, Command-Q. It’s like effin’ brokerage commissions. I might have sold at $0.10 per share higher than I bought, but if I only traded 100 shares and my broker’s commission is $10, I didn’t actually make any money.

The other two times this design left the Photoshop mock-up phase, I forced it out. Both times, I wasn’t entirely happy with the design. The first time, I got all the way to the templating phase (for reference: mock-up ~> test page ~> templating) before realizing there was no way I could make it work. I scrapped it at the end of July / beginning of August and started over. I worked on its replacement into the test page phase, where I got fed up with how certain parts of it looked.

That was a few weeks ago. Since then, I overhauled the page’s layout and shifted the color scheme to the point where I’m eager to show it off. Sadly, no sneak peeks until I’m done though. =)

If this design had a mantra, it would be “Nothing is sacred.” Over the past year+, I’ve revisited parts of the design several times and scrapped the whole design once in search of a look and feel that I would be happy with. That’s not something I would’ve done in the past. Before, once I finished part of the design, I wouldn’t touch it again. I’ve been regularly taking screenshots, so you’ll all get to see my wanderings. It would make an interesting slideshow, actually.

No sneak peeks today, but here’s what I reveal about the new design:

1. It’s blue. (Sorry to all the fans of pink)
2. It’s 1024×768-optimized.
3. It sports a shiny new logo. New = I designed it in August, but none of you (save Xero) have seen it yet.
4. It has a listing of recent comments (all weblogs which have comments enabled should have it), recent reviews, and links to interesting stuff (like The Diamond Invention).
5. It has curves.
6. It doesn’t use JavaScript.
7. It won’t use cookies if everyone’s cool with 2.0 gamma (between Mac-standard and Windows-standard).
8. It’s another space theme.
9. There might be an iPod drawing.

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