Giantpaper.org

Apparently, I put up a new layout. I’ve been meaning to do so for some time, but I just couldn’t think of anything I really liked.

As you may or may not know, I like simple layouts, so I strived to make a simple layout. And I guess I decided to be a bit of a rebel with this layout. >:) There’s seems to be more emphasis on the header images of a website layout than on the actual part where the content is shown (judging by the amount of brushes and filters that appear to be on said images). And there’s also the folks who think a layout’s too boring, unless if it has an image or two on it.

(A small tangent that’s related to this post.) Before I thought of doing this layout, I was over at TheFanlistings.org message board, where one of the members mentioned that someone else had hotlinked her layout. I figured that said hotlinker must have a lot of time on their hands, if they were able to hotlink all her layout images and her stylesheet (if she has one). Since the HTML is the backbone of website layout, that would have to be hotlinked too, right? (I don’t know how you would hotlink HTML coding though…)

I took a look at what the perpetrator had done, and saw that they had only hotlinked a single image. So, how does one image = layout? Well, according to the TFL board member, header images pretty much make up a layout, so the other person had technically hotlinked her layout.

That kind of baffled me a bit, since I never heard of that sort of logic before. There are some people who have minimalist header images (::points upward::) and there are some who have no header images. Does this mean they have no layout?

And there are more to layouts than just header images. It’s just how you display things in whatever medium you’re using. I mean, you could have a layout when you’re creating a catalogue, a newspaper, a magazine, etc (since newspapers have been around longer than computers and the Internet, I would assume people used “layout” in the design sense to refer to them before computers came around).

So with this current layout, I decided to take emphasis off of the header image and move it elsewhere. And to show these folks that you can do more with how you display your content.

But despite that, the whole comment about header images and layout isn’t what drove me to create this layout. It was just other people who see simplicity as being boring, too plain or blah, so I decided to make simplicity look interesting. There are a couple quotes that go along with this idea (”Less is more”*) I used the idea of paper journals as an inspiration, combined with desktop application-type journals (like Journler for example).

*Which I always thought was started by the Bauhaus, but according to Wikipedia, it was Robert Browning.

By the way, the scripty-looking font I used throughout the layout is called Journal (which was the inspiration for the paper journal feel). I was going to use Vladmir Script, but I felt Journal had a more relaxed feel.

Modified: June 28th, 2008