Kelli Shaver

I had been meaning to redesign my site for quite some time now. In fact, I had become so disgusted with the previous design that at one point I took it offline completely. I ended up tossing a temporary page up a few days later, just to have something there, but a redesign was clearly in order.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about responsive design and the changing shape of the web, but my own site largely ignored many of those same principles (It’s still not quite there yet-I need to add high-res artwork for retina displays).

I have all kinds of excuses. Most of them have to do with being busy with work and being too blind to see to do any decent design work (until a fantastic doctor came to my rescue, that is)…. but it felt a bit hypocritical, that old layout.

Also, I wanted a new look, a better, cleaner look. I think I’ve found that now. I’m very happy with the new layout. It incorporates many things I believe strongly in - at least I think it does.

It’s accessible.
It’s easy to read.
It’s fast and lightweight.
It’s instantly communicative.
It’s simple, but not boring.

It only took a few hours to execute, but I’ve been designing it in my head for weeks now.

I feel like it’s one of the best things I’ve designed in quite a while, and I’m very pleased by that. It’s good to have the old eyeball working well enough to do this sort of thing again.

(OK, that might be the under-statement of the year for me. After losing my sight to the point that walking down the street or cooking dinner was dangerous and nearly impossible to do, to being able to see better than I ever have, I’m ecstatic.)

1 year ago

Introducing “Pulp”

Last week was a bit slow for me, so I took the time to put together a little something I’d been meaning to do for quite a while now and built Pulp.

What’s that, you ask? Pulp is a lightweight, fluid, responsive CSS reset and 12-column grid system. Yeah, there are a lot of those out there already, but I like mine. :)

Pulp Homepage

I put it together from bits and pieces of CSS I found myself re-using from project to project, so I decided it was better to have everything in one handy file.

Pulp is small and lacks a lot of necessary rules for complex interfaces, but that’s not really what it was designed for. As the name implies, it’s just the little meaty bits at the heart of it all.

Check it out.

1 year ago

Responsive Design: Why You're Doing it Wrong

Here’s an interesting article on some of the short-comings on the current techniques often employed in responsive design.

My own take is similar. I prefer to build a fluid layout with only a few media query ‘breakpoints’ where needed, rather than building many different versions tailored to specific device resolutions.

1 year ago

Design for Social Impact

Great video.

1 year ago

Responsinator

Quickly test responsive designs at multiple device resolutions.

I love a good -inator.