I started Random Process, née Nfiniti Plus One, in 2005 to keep in touch with friends and share my thoughts after moving from childhood home of Prince Edward Island. Since then, I’ve charted my progress through university, showcasing my changing interests and passions. I am about to graduate from my engineering program and enter the working world, and it’s time for this blog to grow up as well. Writing about my day to day thoughts and activities is no longer very appropriate for the environment I’ll be in.

Photography has increasingly become a significant part of my interests and I’m going to repurpose Random Process to show my work. I’ve posted a photo or two in the past, but the design of the site was never conducive to displaying the work in a pleasing manner. What you see here is the design I’ve come up with to put the emphasis on photography.

Hopefully this will also be an incentive for me to get off my butt and process the sea of photos on my hard drives. Enjoy the stay.

So, when I read about cufón and subsequently typeface.js not three days ago, I realized the means for inserting some new fonts into the design was possible.

Then imagine my surprise when I sat down in my User Interface Design class today and found out the topics for the lecture would be typography, fonts, and design salience. The first few lectures of that course have been a bit dry. They focused more on the analytical (scientific) side of UI design. They drove the design processes and methodologies used for gathering information on the system, with which design decisions can be made. Now with that largely out of the way, we’ve moved onto the emotional design (artistic) portion of the course. This is what I signed up for.

As with any practical topic, attempting to teach design in a classroom can be difficult (similarly, we had a debate on the merits of teaching entrepreneurship in my entrepreneurship class), but I firmly believe that there are academic concepts which can be used in very practical situations. For example, our discussion today on the effect of color on design element salience enabled me to make a better decision (in my opinion) in the upcoming redesign. That’s academia in practice.

There’s been some serious neglect around here. I honestly haven’t had much to write about these past days. University has started back up, but I’ve felt completely listless this semester. Part of it has to do with the fact that it is my final undergraduate semester (boy, it feels weird, not necessarily good to say that), and part of it is that my schedule isn’t conducive to a whole lot of caring. Classes start no earlier than 11:30am each morning and I have Thursdays off. I should be careful not to let go too much. Reading the fourth year design project documentation is so very boring. The lack of enthusiasm and interest has translated to this blog for the past couple weeks. I can’t remember the last time I felt this way.

Fortunately, I felt a burst of inspiration mid-day Saturday, but not in the form of writing. Instead, I spent a chunk of time mocking up a redesign for random process, working late into the night. I’ve come up with something I’m happy with. Now comes the tough part of translating my static Photoshop mock into a real, working website. Here are a couple teasers.

Photography has clearly been a huge part of my life over the past two years. I think it’s about time the website reflects this. I’m going to put more emphasis on showcasing some photos.

I purchased a Zune HD while I was working in the States, and have come to absolutely love the design of the UI. You can expect to see many of its design elements incorporated in the final product, such as purposely truncated text.

Furthermore, web technologies and ‘fads’ have progressed at a rapid pace since my most recent design (about a year ago). I mentioned back then that I wanted to incorporate a bunch of dynamic features and a more static portfolio homepage, that would make the site a bit slicker to navigate. Unfortunately, only the blog portion of the site got redesigned and there’s still no AJAX-y goodness. As much as I’d like otherwise, it’s unlikely I’m going to have much of a portfolio to showcase, and I haven’t come up with a good way to manage the content there, short of a lot of manual editing. And let’s be honest, I’m almost sure to let the content get stale. Yuck. But, I’ve identified some cool effects that I want in the next iteration of random process. Yum.

Okay, I’ll leave it at that. Night.

I can understand the university’s desire to create a more distinct image for itself in the international community, instead of 1 amongst the multitude of name and shield logos. However, I only hope people don’t recognize the brand for all the wrong reasons. Any publicity isn’t necessarily good publicity. I mean what’s with the neon rainbows? This looks like something I’d do to introduce color into an otherwise dull (monocolor) design. Color for the sake of it. I know, the irony.

That said, I’m somewhat partial to the banners that have gone up on lamp-posts around the school thus far. I just hope the new brand never makes it on any official UWaterloo documentation. I, for one, am glad my diploma will keep the old name-and-shield.

I don’t profess to be a graphics artist. My Photoshop skills are pretty meager. Yet at the same time, I’ve wanted to add some more character to my designs, which have traditionally been pretty dull. This time, I turned to a couple of interesting colors to liven things up. I really can’t say there was any technique in picking the shade of blue and orange. Nevertheless, I rather enjoy how they mix.

As you may have noticed, there are no sidebars, per se. Consequently, much of the miscellaneous content that took up that space in the past has essentially disappeared. This was intentional, with the reason being that there will eventually be a permanent homepage, which will contain the things that don’t quite fit in with the blog nature of this site.

The lack of sidebar(s) also puts the focus directly on the content. Because the homepage will be the portal to other forms of content, I can focus solely on the writing here. In that same vein, the blog index now shows full posts, instead of one feature and then excerpts only. This translates into less clicking and more reading.

The single column layout also gives me much more flexibility in presenting different types of posts in different ways. As photography is becoming a bigger part of my interests (and subsequently, a bigger part of the posts here), I felt confined by the approximately 500 pixel wide content areas I had to work with. I want to showcase larger images, and this new layout allows me to do that easily.

Of note, the archives section of the site has been completely redesigned. I used a fancy AJAX archives plugin in the past, but I wasn’t happy with the navigation, which was simply a giant list of dates and posts. Instead, I’ve created a table-like structure, where the user can select both year and month to drill down into the archives.

The same general format is used for the search and category pages as well, although I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to put on the side for the category version. Meanwhile, the search results page will throw up another search box if a lot of results are returned. I figure the user might want to refine their search if it happens that what they initially searched for returns too many results to go through easily.

Finally, to keep with the WordPress times (e.g. version 2.7.1), I’ve included support for threaded comments. The new comment function, wp_list_comments, is nice in that it eliminates a lot of code for the designer and surfaces so many classes with which one can modify the look of comments. Unfortunately, creating a custom callback to use a completely different HTML layout means all those useful classes, which identify things like odd/even posts, author responses, and more are lost. In addition, the function itself isn’t well documented on the Codex, so I had to reference other sources, and rip out my share of hair, fiddling to get things the way I wanted. I’m planning on writing a few tidbits for others in the same position. Even Otto’s excellent post didn’t quite do it.

I’m pretty happy with the design overall, and with this semester as horrifically busy as it is, there’s probably little time to make major changes even if I wanted to.

I’ll write a much more complete post on my design philosophy and the key features, but for now, I’m hoping to get some feedback, mostly to ensure things aren’t broken all over the place. I’m perusing the site, looking for bugs, but if everyone helps out, it’ll be a much quicker task. Key things to focus on would be the threaded replies of WordPress 2.7, which are now supported, along with the archives.

I’m no where near done implementing all the features I want to, but the core is there and I think it’s a big step up on what I had before. I’ll roll out incremental updates to the design over the next little while.

I hope you enjoy the new design!

I didn’t get started until two days ago, so predictably, there’s still quite some work left to do. As well, since things aren’t quite ready yet on the main page front, it’ll only by the blog portion of the site that gets refreshed. There’s not enough time during this break to do any meaningful work on my plans for a gadget section (boy, do I ever need one).

That’s all for now! The break has been great. For now, it’s time to watch Canada’s last chance at the Stanley Cup in the Vancouver Canucks play. Wish them luck!

I finally sat down and whipped up some mocks this past week and they’re coming along quite nicely. I won’t give away the farm yet, but here are a few select portions of the design.

There are many things I like with the existing design, such as the ‘topbar’ before the content. However, I wanted to streamline those components and really focus on what they’re intended to do: drive readership. That means I’m taking out recent comments in favor of more prominent placement for the feed. You can already subscribe to individual post comments, so displaying the recent ones doesn’t seem as valuable as increasing subscribers.

A first for random process, I’m going have a ‘static’ home page, designed to act as a portfolio of my interests. It’s time I better organized the things I’m passionate about, as opposed to simply writing them here, interspersed with everything else. I want to immediately impress upon a first-time viewer what I’m interested in and what he/she can expect to find.

Space is at a premium on the home page, so I’ll be putting some of the JavaScript skills I picked up over the last work term to use to shuffle between post excerpts and spruce things up.

I’m not sure when the design will actually be implemented. Hopefully I can put in a couple hours each week to complete it before the end of the semester.