The house is valuable because it is the house.
Two weeks ago, I quietly pushed up a new look for this website. Some redesigns happen over a year or two; others happen over a few months. Neither one’s easy, mind you, but this one’s the latter.
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A month or so back, I told an old friend I was in the middle of redesigning this little site. She laughed and said, “Again?!” Which, you know, extremely and completely fair! The last design went up in March of last year, giving it a little more than 15 months in the sun. I loved it when it went up, and I still do: there were some little flourishes that felt right at launch, and I’m proud of myself for figuring out how to build a few design elements that I honestly didn’t think I could build.
But in last few months, I couldn’t look at the site without seeing every rough edge: the uneven gaps that had crept into the design, the too-clever layouts that felt fragile, the long passages of text that never felt like they nailed the rhythm. And the boxes! My god, the boxes: for related articles, for newsletters, for books, for little autobiographical blurbs. Boxes for just about everything but thee and me.
This is all to say that I started this redesign to pare things back — way, way back — and try to find my way to something a little calmer. A little more open, maybe.
This is where I’ve landed. At least for now.
In addition to generally simplifying the design, I knew I wanted warmth. A lot more. The blues of the last design were feeling too cold, too distant. I started reaching for reds, for yellows and creams, for an anchoring earth tone or two. I’m sure the work I’d done redesigning You Deserve A Tech Union was still swirling around in my brain, but the warmer hues felt like a nice change after a year awash in deep, dark blues.
And the new design has a number of textures I quite like. Some of them are new, like the splashes of watercolor that bookend each page; the navigation has a little blending applied to it, which I think gives it a nice gold leaf-under-oil effect. But it’s not all new: for one, the map relief is still with us, in part because I can’t imagine this site without it. (It’s adapted from a relief map of a mountain near where I grew up.)
And I suppose the site’s typography continues that theme of blending old and new, mixing new faces in with familiar ones. Klim Type’s Untitled Sans is still tucked in around the edges, but I’ve pulled in General Type’s Cambon for headings and titles. For body text, I’ve brought back [Black[Foundry]’s Vesterbro](<https://black-foundry.com/fonts/vesterbro/>), which I used (and loved) in an earlier redesign.
When it came to figuring out what needed to live on my homepage, I started by looking around a bit. I love Naz’s homepage, as well as mandy’s brand new one; you won’t have to squint too hard to see the influence of their homepages’ structure on mine. I love how both Naz and mandy treat their homepages like the start of a branching forest path: there’s a brief introduction to the author, then a few links to recent entries, and then a few hand-picked favorites. And that felt right for my homepage. With that in place, I took all the biographical fooferaw I used to have there, and shunted it to a proper about page. And that division feels right: after all, that content’s about me , not the website.
And finally, and maybe most importantly, journal pages are much more open and calm than they used to be.
The site’s layouts have been dramatically simplified throughout, and journal entries are no exception. I’ve ended my dalliance with sidebars and three-up grids, instead reverting back to one single column of text. And at least right now, I quite like the more streamlined reading experience.
I will say I’m glad I finally got a chance to play with view transitions — shout out to Durgesh Rajubhai Pawar’s excellent tutorials — which I think add a lovely little effect in browsers that support them. They won’t show up if you, like me, use Firefox as your main browser, but browsers like Chrome, Edge, or Safari should work. (In my testing, they seem to work best in Chrome.)
There are a bunch other little details throughout the redesign that I’m proud of, but I’m aware that this post is already long enough.
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If I’m honest, I struggled with this redesign. I’d spent the weeks prior to launch doing nothing but unglamorous finishing work: building new features, tidying up ancient templates in Eleventy, and fixing bugs. It’s about at this point that the self doubt settled in. I wondered if it was too spare, or maybe not spare enough. And as always seems to happen around this time, I wondered if the design was even any good. Why didn’t things feel easier? Shouldn’t they feel easy if this redesign was a step in the right direction?
(I swear, a personal site redesign never used to feel this challenging. But then, I used to be a lot younger; that probably has something to do with it.)
I’ll also say that a new kind of worry crept in this time, one I’d never dealt with before. Just this week The New Yorker wrote a piece on the emerging aesthetic of LLM-generated websites, which all seem to be settling into a smear of same-y markers: of “beige- and cream-colored backgrounds, rusty orange-hued accents, and large serif typefaces.” Naz even mentions he tackled his redesign in part to avoid that aesthetic, and here I was worrying I’d stepped directly in it. I love what I do, but I feel like I have to work hard — hard — to produce something I can be proud of. And I couldn’t stand the idea of a visitor looking at my work, and just assuming I’d pressed a button to make it happen. 1
My response to all this hand-wringing was an overwhelming desire to yeet. I launched the redesign, at least in part, to get it off my desk. And in what I’m sure future design historians will surely call a stunning display of timeliness and marketing savvy, I didn’t write about it anywhere until now. In that time, a little space has been helpful. I’ve been able to reconnect with the parts of the design I first loved, and just, like, enjoy looking at my website. The rough edges have even fallen away into the background. They’re still there, of course, but they feel less prominent, less sharp. They even feel like they have a little bit of promise, if that makes sense? They feel like future questions to explore — opportunities to refine, or to redesign.
In short, it feels good to have my worry stone back. I hope you like it, of course; I’m just happy to have it at a place where I like it. It feels a bit like coming home.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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Footnote
- That’s why I wrote an “AI” statement. I wanted to make clear that this site was — for better and for worse — made by me. (And as you might imagine, I’m upset I felt I even had to write this.) ↩︎
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This has been “The house is valuable because it is the house.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
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