I’m pleased to announce Russ Posegate’s new site design available at posegate.org/russ.

About four weeks ago, Russ and I were discussing the site he set up on Verizon’s web space and the fact that his birthday was coming up soon. He already had a wishlist set up, but I asked if he’d be interested in a blog redesign. Russ replied in his inimitable style:

O web hero of mine,

Wow, I could ask no greater gift. Sweet, sweet user-friendly interface…A place to say what I really think…More excuses to call you and chew the fat…

Let me be totally honest…This had entered my mind anyway

I checked it out with the Schmoze, who said it was a good idea, and–poof–no more free weeknights for a while. Actually, it was a neat opportunity to do something different than tweaking Our Story. Aside from this site, and a departmental website I’d built for work four years ago, I’d never really built a site from concept to design to implementation. I had been reading about a lot of cool ideas over the past couple of months, so there were a number of influences on this design.

h4. Typeface

Overall, I was shooting for a “classy” looking site to try and fit Russ’ personality. Naturally, the typeface had to be a serif font. Dave Shea’s recent exploration of Times New Roman got me playing around with line-height and letter-spacing. I think the effect came across pretty well. The typeface is legible without looking tired. Almost all of the site is set in some variant of Times New Roman.

h4. Background

The background graphic is a pattern that I obtained free of charge from Travis Beckham’s site, SquidFingers. Travis is a web designer who “is obsessed with patterns.” He has a selection of over 130 cool, indie-looking patterns that he’s put into the public domain for free use. The one I used on Russ’ site has been converted to grayscale. (I found Travis’ site via Keith).

h4. Banner

The banner graphic is a modified photo obtained from iStockphoto.com (via the Notorious B.I.–er, Zeldman). This site provides royalty-free photos that you can use in your own derivative works. I’ve also heard of iStockphoto from reading Doug Bowman’s A Design Process Revealed. The picture was maipulated in Adobe Photoshop Elements.

h4. Geek Stuff

Techies will appreciate that the new posegate.org also validates XHTML Transitional and CSS out of the box. The site also passes Section 508 Accessibility. But, of course, I didn’t want to clutter Russ’ site with that stuff.

All in all, I’m pleased with how the site turned out. I’d be really interested to hear comments and suggestions–and, in particular, bug reports. I haven’t had much chance to test this layout in anything but Firebird 0.7/Win and IE6/Win, so perspectives from other operating systems and browsers are welcome.

Happy Birthday, Russ.