Jason Santa Maria’s wonderful redesign is a powerful example of what can be done with weblogs

I just noticed Jason Santa Maria has re-designed his site after five long years. While I always thought his old site design was wonderfully unique and a great example of his talent, his new version takes design on the web to a whole new level. 

He has masterfully utilized css in a very forward thinking fashion that allows him to actually art direct and design each post. This fine tuned approach to design gives him the ability to lay style on top of each entry essentially making his entire weblog a living portfolio of design. The only other site I’ve see to really utilize this effect well has been A Brief Message, which takes editorial writing to a whole new level by applying a new style over the top every time they publish.

Looking through JSM’s site code (and structure) a bit and reading over his first post of the new version, detailing his rationale for the change, has really got me to thinking about whether this could be a completely new direction for designer-based websites. 

As a designer I’m always looking for opportunities to extend my design abilities through a variety of projects (personal and professional.) Sometimes coming up with new ideas and avenues can be difficult, but this method of design actually provides a virtually limitless base of opportunities for design exploration-just by initiating the a new post. Amazing!

Congrats to my fellow ALA-er, Jason, on his wonderful new design.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Design, Review, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.