Semester Portfolio 3: Making The Blog
When making the blog, the priority I had in mind for design was easy navigation. I chose Tumblr for ease of design and my familiarity with it - though Tumblr I learnt some HTML because as a teenager I kept a blog and would edit it how I wanted. Tumblr lets you choose themes to display your blog in different ways. I started off with a theme called Glump, where I could choose a blog background.
I didn’t get a capture of myself using Glump, but above I have included an example. I cycled through a few different backgrounds, including photographs I had taken during documenting, and marks I had made in the mark making workshop, but it became apparent that having a picture for a background was very busy and didn’t fit my intentions super well. Martin also critiqued the size of the sidebar and main column of posts - the posts should be bigger, the sidebar smaller. I tried a few more different themes, focusing on simplicity.
After I had tried some without a sidebar, or ones where the sidebar stayed at the top of the page, it was apparent that I did need a fixed sidebar for navigation simplicity. Because many of the posts are so long and dense on this blog, I didn’t want you, the reader, to have to keep scrolling down and then back up to re-navigate the blog. I settled on the theme below, called Mundi, with a smaller sidebar and a larger blog display area than Glump. I edited some of the HTML to change certain things. For example, I got rid of “notes” (where you see how many likes and reblogs Tumblr posts have). I got rid of the function that tells you how many days ago a post was posted because it was not vital information, nor accurate, as I have retroactively edited post dates to reflect the chronology they should appear in on the blog.
After a few more tweaks, it turned into the blog you see before you now.
On the blog I chose to split up each project into it’s fundamental parts, as it happened chronologically, and as it happened developmentally. I split up the project into sections defined by my actions in those sections, such as a research phase, initial ideas, outcomes, etc.
