My first reaction when seeing this site was “wow !”. My second reaction was “huh ?”. Let me explain.
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To celebrate the launch of my newest design, I tought I’d explain how I did it and what tools and plugins I used. Not to say that I did anything special. The blog (Blue China) is pretty simple, and not supposed to make it to the top of all CSS galleries overnight (although it would be cool if it did). But even so, I think designers are always interested in seeing how others work.

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Blue China is a customized WordPress blog. Besides the custom design (which follows a water theme, as the blog is abou water management in China), it uses plugins to display a RSS news feed, a contact form, and many other tweaks which make reading the blog more enjoyable.

I also used a magazine type layout with one big featured article and three smaller article blocks instead of the traditional blog presentation. I feel this helps give the site its own identity, and moreover I think that the traditional “20 posts on one page” approach is really only appropriate for blogs that get updated every day (or more). Lastly, by reminding people of a newspaper or magazine layout, I hope this design will make the blog appear more serious and official ! (not that it needs that..).

I’ve never liked Myspace. Maybe that’s cause I’m a web designer, and Myspace is kind of like designer’s kryptonyte. But I tought Facebook would be different. This was supposed to be the smart people’s Myspace. A way to stay in contact with friends without risk of having horrible music blasting through your speakers everytime you click a link.

But it now appears Facebook is as broken as Myspace is. The only difference is that it’s more insidious.

At first I was happy to be hugged by 12 people every day, and overjoyed that my friends cared enough about me to handpick annoying applications and invite me to install them.

Then I installed one of those myself, and realized that it replicates itself by sending invites to all your contacts by default. Sure, my friends “invited” me to use Super Wall, just like people “invite” you to catch the flu by not washing their filthy hands.

On top of that, not a single person has written on my Super Wall. And I’m hoping that people are getting green with envy when they see how many countries I’ve been to on my “Where I’ve Been” page, but I’m not counting on it. After all, I sure didn’t check out anybody else’s countries. Who cares about where those guys went to anyway ?

So now I’m going on a Facebook diet. I’ll start by uninstalling all my apps, except maybe “nothing”. At least this one works as advertised.

One of the new trends among web designers has to be grid design. While grid design is a simple concept, there are now so many tools and ways of doing it that it might get confusing for newcomers. So here is my way of doing things, i.e. how I would explain grid design to someone who’s never heard about it.

My aim here is not to be exhaustive and shower you with links and fancy tools, actually it’s quite the opposite. I’ll give a few links for each section, but if you’re short on time, just click on the first one !

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