It’s depressing, quite frankly, looking at how quickly the design I cobbled together for this blog has aged. I’ve got a few sites I’m hoping to start work on in the near future - one’s going to be this blog, one will be a review site that I’m hoping will encourage me to start writing, enjoy it, and never stop, and the third is a new home for the hand converter - so I’ve been looking at CMS, wordpress templates, and other people’s personal sites for inspiration. And that’s even more depressing. Some people, it seems, just get it, and others, like me, don’t. The designy part of my brain is just too inactive, it seems. Couple that with the frustration at trying to get things just so in CSS, and it makes me want to silently weep.
For example: this looks pretty neat, as does this in its own way (I’m very much into this vertical design thing at the moment), and although I can see in my mind various things I could do with my own layouts, I don’t know that I can turn woolly thoughts in my head into hard CSS and actual, real web pages.
But I don’t want to just cop out and take a template that someone else has designed, just because it’s a) lazy, and b) designed originally for someone else and for another site. It wouldn’t be mine, and it wouldn’t feel mine.
I quite like the flow of this design, though, although it’s sometimes a bit cryptic.
Maybe I just need to approach it all professionally. If I sit down and log the hours it takes me to get the review site running, maybe I’ll be more focussed on the design as I work. Maybe I should start sketching designs out as well.
Got me yet another plugin - this time,