Slightly ajar

You may have noticed a few changes with the style of this blog. I wanted to keep the site similar so that it is still recognisable, yet refresh it as I thought it have become a bit stale. I always wanted a image in the header and the main background as it was a bit bland. Not being a graphic artist, I wasn't best suited to drawing something myself.

After going to the Diesel store in Oslo, and later in New York City, I liked the wallpaper they had in parts of the store. It's a bit like your grand mothers wallpaper, but in moderation in looks kind of cool. Then when I saw what Truls (one of our web designers) did with a similar design for our Rock Opera event in San Francisco, I though it'd be an idea to use something similar. Unfortunately it is hard to use as having such a design really hurts your eyes when repeated and trying to read body text. I'm also not the most skilled at turning an image like that into something that can tile. Fortunately, when checking out Chris Messina's blog he had made a similar pattern and went through the trouble of making it tiled. Not wanting that good work go to waste, and as it was released under a Creative Commons licence, I decided to reuse this, to see what it'd look like. The original file can be found here. I wanted a lighter version for the header and a darker, almost black version for the background, so I broke out Preview (I told you I was a great graphic artist) and played with the levels. I'm not 100% happy with the result yet, so I think I'll have to play around with it a bit more to get the colours right. I'd prefer the header image background to be a bit more white, with the detail still visible, and maybe the main background a bit lighter so it can be seen a bit better (the colour isn't set up so well on my monitor however). I don't want to make it too visible as it will effect readability and give all my readers a headache. Hopefully that isn't a problem at the moment?

I also used the CSS3 background-size property to resize the image. This will currently only work in the latest Opera, Safari and Konqueror. I might resize the image later, but it is nice to play around with CSS3 and it is not essential that the image is the correct size. I also used text-shadow to make the drops caps, titles and blog post dates stand out a bit more. You may notice in Safari or Firefox that there are a few rounded corners, but this is the only concession made to the Web 2.0 design style.

I was also never very happy with the tag cloud, which was more or less left the same as the default styling on MyOpera. Instead of the huge text, I reduced each tag size to a similar size (1.4 - 1em) and used various levels of opacity to make the less important tags fade out. Of course this wont work in browsers that don't support this, like IE, but it degrades nicely anyway.

What does everyone think of the changes?