New Look

Posted on January 3, 2004    Posted by John Scalzi

Well, that wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be. I’ve been considering making changes to the look of the Whatever for a while now but held back mostly because, of course, I haven’t the slightest clue as to what I’m doing when it comes to playing with CSS scripts. But eventually my need for novelty superseded my fear of messing up a year’s worth of entries, and here we are, with a new look. It is, if I may say so, Jupiterrific!

The two big changes are the background (and the title image) and the appearance of the font. The background I chose for because it’s appropriate for me on a number of levels. First and most obviously, it echoes the cover of my book The Rough Guide to the Universe, which also features Jupiter and Io (that’s the moon you see) on its cover. Second and only slightly less obviously, I write science fiction, so a celestial theme’s not a bad idea. Third, it simply looks cool. Now, if I were truly supercool, I would be able to make it so the background picture didn’t move while you scrolled. But apparently I’m not supercool. I think I’ll survive.

The font change I made primarily for personal aesthetic reasons, in that I think fonts with serifs (in a general sense) look elegant and read well (so long as you have a decent leading between the lines). Also, I’d done sans-serif fonts here for a couple of years now (trebuchet and arial) and I was getting kind of bored with ’em. So your new official Whatever font is Garamond: Solid, readable, classic. I left the sidebars as san serif, however, on account they are of (relatively) smaller type, so san serif is easier to read (also because they’re on a dark background now). I’ve left the comments in san serif as well to differentiate them from the main text. I’ve also changed the color of the main copy text from gray to dark green. Two reasons: Green is my favorite color (and this particular green is dark enough that it doesn’t present eye strain issues), and I’ve always thought the previous grey could have been a smidge darker.

I hope you like the look, because now you’re stuck with it, probably for about a year, which I imagine will be the time it takes for me to get well and truly sick of the design and yearn for something new. Novelty! It’s the spice of life.