Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

Last week I came across this priceless article, in which the author states that, “The more time that is spent dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing a design by the wrong kinds of people the worse that design gets. The same trend applies to the number of people involved in the design process.” And then he goes on to illustrate these points with some awesome graphs. ;o) Let me go on record by saying that this is SO TRUE.

Since April of this year I have been working for HGTV.com creating their monthly and bi-monthly Gardening Newsletters. This has been great for me in so many ways.

The other day I was charged with implementing the realign of Energy Muse, a site I had coded last year. Energy Muse had redone their logo, and therefore wanted a site-wide facelift that would reflect their altered branding.

This was the first time that I had been involved in the realign of one of my own sites. Not to toot my own horn but I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW EASY IT WAS! Seriously, I was amazed to see a real-life zen garden type switcharoo. I did not touch the html. Not even a little bit. Uploading a few new images and an updated CSS sheet was all that was required to transform this:

Into this:

Remember Papyrus? It started really showing itself several years ago, particularly in the identity material of alternative health practitioners? I’ll admit, I really liked it. I even used it as my default font for IMing for a while. But then it started showing up more and more. I started seeing it everywhere – on brochures, on awnings, on invitations. And it seemed that everyone was using it for their logos.

Slashdot has been accepting submissions for a redesign contest and yesterday I submitted my design.

I don’t know how interesting this is going to be for anyone but … I spend so much time talking about code that I thought it might be fun to document my (somewhat random) design process. For this peep into The Mind of Mani we’re going to be looking at my latest CSS Zen Garden submission: Elegance in Simplicity.