It’s been forever that I haven’t put any aesthetics filter on my blog’s design. For years (in Turkish version) I’ve custom coded my site many times over. It hosted a lot of my development ideas and acted as a playground for me.
But then I realized I only want to focus on my writing after having a long multi-year break on pushing any updates on my blog. Now I approach it more disciplined with a content calendar, a growing list of ideas to write about. I still think it lacks a “focus” but hey, that’s probably how my brain is in these years.
I’ve switched to WordPress a few years ago and have been finding WordPress to be a beautiful platform to use for many different purposes which I find some topics pretty interesting like using WordPress as headless cms for – let’s say a mobile application.
Without a particular motivation, I wanted to re-evaluate both functionality/usability and some design elements to break the monotone nature the current blog ended up at (because most of what I write is not visual anymore, mostly my thoughts on stuff). I wanted to bring some visual cues even if they are abstract patterns or shapes. I love geometry and I find my blog’s overall theme to match perfectly with some design and the creative world but more skewed towards engineering-backed topics. That’s why I look at what I do much more like architecting a digital product rather than just coding it up, or design (which is not my strong suit).
I hope the new homepage design introduces little but more usability to whoever reading my blog and when they visit the homepage, to be able to scan my latest posts, with a subtle category-based visualization and a little bit more consistent-colorful tone.
At some point, I still want to bring back the regular feed-like flow along with this current design.
I’m also working on possible updates on other parts of the site which will be more subtle changes and/or will be very much aligned with this new design approach.
Let me know in the comments, how you feel about this new design approach and the way I explained if there is anything surprising or if you have any feedback.