So now that Museum Themes is up, WordPress 3.0 is out, and web fonts have made huge strides in browser-integration, I’m thinking about redesigning jazzsequence.com. Again.
Okay, yes, I am fully frakking aware that I redesign my site more frequently than a hooker gets checked for STDs, and even the Browncoat theme lasted longer than the current design. But here’s the thing with both of these designs: both of them were just products of trends or ideas I was really into at the time. This theme is sort of a failed experiment at making WordPress more like Facebook, except that the problem with that is that — from a content standpoint, Facebook sucks ass. Who the fuck wants to read someone’s Facebook wall, I mean honestly? I did this, I unlocked that, I’m listening to this stuff, help me with my Mafia, I need 4 nails, this is a cool article. Twitter might be self-indulgent, but at least there’s some people out there (and I try to be one of them) that provides valuable and/or interesting links, direct interaction, possibly some witty or snarky commentary. So, yeah, an endless stream of the stuff I happen to be doing right this second? Probably best left as an interesting idea and that’s that. There’s a reason why you don’t see the word “lifestream” around nearly so much now as you did a year or 6 months ago.
With Museum, I was building things into the themes that I thought was cool, like @font-face calls. jazzsequence.com’s current theme (called ::metal:: in case you didn’t know) still relies on sIFR — an old font-rendering workaround that converts text into a Flash swf and displays that. The problem is — in case you didn’t notice — sIFR can be slow as all hell, and everytime I load this site that pisses me off. Especially when I know there’s a better way of doing it (namely, calling the freaking font).
There’s still stuff I like about ::metal::, don’t get me wrong, and I’ll include that stuff in whatever incarnation the design takes. It’s just sort of lame lusting after WordPress themes I designed for other people and being frustrated with my own blog design. And there’s so many things that WP 2.9.2 – 3.0 added that I’ve been dying to use instead of, or in addition to the things I’m doing now that it just drives me insane.
The problem, of course, is that my mind, inevitably, veers toward the function more than the form — which was the case with ::metal::. I have no real idea what I want the new theme to look like (other than something else), I just know what I want it to act like. At least with Browncoat I had an idea and I liked it, it just became limiting when what I wanted to do with the site broadened. I think the main problem with where I went with the design for ::metal:: was that I was still thinking too much in-the-box. I wasn’t looking at art, I was looking at BlueprintCSS and grid-based design, and that’s what I did. I think this time around, I’m going to have to look at some frickin’ art.
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