“Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.”

When I made a comment about the amount of retweets occurring on this post, I got a reply from Molly Holzschlag (who I respect, but am incapable of pronouncing the last name of):

“Bless my pals at AEA but the entire comment is bait or a very misguided statement to make on the brink of 2010.”

When two people who helped define the industry as it is today have a difference of opinion, I’m left on the sidelines wondering which to agree with. One the one hand, I agree with the concept that design needs to occur more in the browser and less in Photoshop, but on the flip side I suspect Molly has some insights that I’m simply not taking into account.

So I’ll throw it to the web at large. What’s your opinion on this topic? Do designers need to start doing more design in (X)HTML and CSS, or are we coders going too far in expecting the to put Photoshop aside in the early design phase?

A major annoyance I had with the previous incarnation of the site was that it looked entirely too much like a WordPress-powered blog.

And yes, it is one. But it’s more than that. It’s become a sort of rallying point for my identity on the massive nest of tubes called the Internet, and I needed it to reflect more than a weekly blog entry about obscure CSS styles. As I’ve been absorbed into more and more social pieces of Web 2.0 (see, even the web can’t avoid that numbering system), I found myself having more and more of a challenge of directing people to various bits of me on the Internet.

“Go here for my photos. Go here for my Twitter, I update that a lot. Go here for my blog, I updated that a bit less. Ooh, I’ve got a comic over here, ad nauseum.”

Well, no longer. I’ve redesigned the site so that the home page operates as central hub for it all. From my massive collection of pictures of my cats to my recent tweets to Mindfly’s official blog, they’re all linked through here. And good riddance. I can cut a few domain names off my e-mail signatures and stationary.

Also, it’s brighter. Although I may adjust the level later based on feedback, it became apparent to me that my old design was a bit too drab in coloration. Not quite somber like a funeral, but more like the cover of a really exciting book about statistics.

Lastly, it incorporates my recent obsession with vector graphics and my continuing experimentation with JavaScript animations. I rather enjoy the header’s parallax scrolling (this doesn’t happen in IE due to that browser’s woefully slow JS engine), and other tiny bits are sprinkled about like digital pixie dust.

I almost wanted to shorten that to “dixie dust”, but that gave entirely the wrong impression.

Now I’m imagining what Confederate fairies are like…

Ok, back on topic. There’s a few kinks to be worked out, such as restraining sub-pages with a maximum width, building a contact form (oh how I loathe contact forms) and discovering a few hidden niches of my site that I’ve forgotten about, but I’m pretty pleased with the results thus far. So here it is: brighter, animated, and socially condensed. If you’ve got any feedback, good or bad, I’d like to hear it.