the density of space

Well, I just finished redesigning the density of space. The initial design that I launched with back in November was deliberately spare—mostly I just wanted to get something up, and I didn’t want the (lack of) visual design to get in the way. The background and the sparklines are generated with NodeBox. The sparklines for each entry encode word count and the relative length of words—an uptick represents a word that is longer than five letters, a downtick represents a word that is shorter than five letters and a bar across the middle represents a word that is exactly five letters. The markup is transitional HTML 5, and the base layer of CSS is Blueprint. The pages are assembled with Mark Bernstein’s most excellent Tinderbox (in which I also do all of my writing and planning for the site). The typeface is (hopefully) either Helvetica Neue or Helvetica, depending on what you have installed.

I’m especially pleased with the process I’ve developed for publishing entries. Basically, I write in Tinderbox, pull the text out and massage it a bit before running it through my sparkline generator and then export from Tinderbox, tweaking any styling as necessary. With all of these seams, I have a lot of control over the outcome of each stage of the process without having to manually assemble each page every time I want to make a change.

Enjoy.