Mel Choyce

  • I finally got the new Facebook update

    A familiar notification ping summoned me over to Facebook. Hark! You’ve received a comment on your status update! When I clicked in to see what the new comment said, I was hit by the new Facebook design. Since then, I’ve had a couple hours to sit around with it in the background. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

    • The top nav/masterbar feels much nicer in this iteration. Already, I feel like I’ve done less hunting for the right thing to click.
    • Everything feels just a little tight. I don’t mind things being a little smaller, and I totally understand why Facebook took the approach they did, but I find myself longing for a bit more space between and inside of updates on my news feed, even at the expense of taller updates. Even just jumping from 12px to 15px inside of each update feels like a world of difference.
    • Same goes for the text itself ā€” the line-height feels a little too short, so everything feels cramped.
    • I’ve wanted to be able to minimize groupings in my left sidebar for the last couple iterations; now that everything is just a little tighter, I really want to be able to now. Something like this:

      facebook-collapsed-sidebar
      Collapsed sidebar. Only while mocking this up did I discover that I can actually archive the plethora of lists I’m shown by default… but archiving doesn’t seem to actually do anything?

    All this said… I am one of those people using a high-end computer with a beautiful retina screen. I’ve been spoiled by large, crisp images and text. A lot of the cramped issues could look better on an average laptop, or a smaller screen. A better test would be to give it a go on my Chromebook and see how it feels in that context. Maybe I’ll check it out when I get home later.

    I don’t find the new Facebook update too bad. And, like all changes, I will adjust. Kudos to Facebook for putting the bulk of their users first, and not just going for the design that looked best on a retina Macbook Pro.

    mel

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  • Soft-launched: redesigned choycedesign.com!

    If you’ve stopped by in the past week or so, you might have noticed a few (well, many) changes. I’ve redesigned my site!

    First, some quick insight into why. I’d been thinking about redesigning for a few months, but couldn’t decide on whether or not I wanted to completely redesign, or just refresh. My old site was static — it started out just html, then got a small upgrade when I learned a little php. That worked okay, but it made updating my portfolio kind of a pain. I eventually wanted to move my design-oriented tumblr directly onto my site, so I ended up setting up WordPress on a subdomain. However, this meant that even though I was keeping my blog on-site, there was a visual change between my main site and my blog (since I decided to use twentyeleven and keep it mostly unchanged).

    Well, with WordPress comes bliss and ease and all of those wonderful things. It was inevitable that I would move my whole site onto WordPress. Once I realized this, I debating whether or not to just convert what I had to a WP theme and call it a day, or make some changes. My old site was feeling a little monotonous, so I tried some simple refreshes in Photoshop. Nothing looked right. I got frustrated. I tried something new. It didn’t look right. I got frustrated.

    Finally, I managed to design something I liked. Then I sat on it for a few weeks. The more I looked at it, the more I wanted to simplify it. I tried an interior, scrapped it. Tried another interior, scrapped that one as well. I looked back at the homepage, and realized, did I really need that much text? I’m not much of a text-person. I don’t really blog all that often. Are my tweets even relevant?

    So, I decided to cut it down. I cut it down so much, I ended up with just a catchphrase. There was something really simple about it that really pleased me, so I ran with it. It was around that point that I realized I wasn’t going to get much further in Photoshop, so I decided to jump head-first into designing it in-browser as I went along.

    It worked out okay for me. I started with the _s WordPress theme, but ended upĀ getting a little lost (I’m not much of a developer). I’m pretty comfortable and familiar with Toolbox, so I switched over to that and really got rolling. Interiors came pretty naturally from there. Things probably aren’t as cohesive as they would have been had I done it all in Photoshop, but I really need to just do it, or else I wasn’t going to do it at all. I had some fun trying out new things, such as Isotope and Lettering.js. Lettering.js was especially nice, since ChaparralĀ had some prettyĀ horrendousĀ default kerning.

    Overall, I’m pretty pleased with my results. I wanted something simple and clean, and I think that I’ve mostly managed to achieve that.Ā It’s still a work-in-progress, of course. A few things I have left on my list to complete:

    • Responsiveness. I know in my head how it will respond to difference browser sizes, just need to get it down in code.
    • Decreasing FOUT
    • Fixing some colorbox/isotope compatibility issues on my portfolio page…Ā colorbox shows all images in a gallery by default, even if they’re hidden, so I need to fix that so it only cycles through filtered results.

    Thanks are also in order for a specific awesome person who helped me out. Thanks, Kelly Dwan, for being my dev support and helping me integrate Isotope with WordPress. You’re a champ. Seriously.

    Anyway, if anyone sees anything odd or things something I’ve done is awkward/looks bad/can be improve, let me know. Iteration is a healthy thing.

    mel

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  • Really nice NBA team logo redesigns by Michael Weinstein

    These are really fantastic. I think my favorites are the Golden State Warriors and the Brooklyn Nets. Definitely like them more than the originals!

    (Also — it’s always interesting finding something cool a while after it was posted. Or maybe I’m just always late to the party.)

    mel

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