January 23, 2008. The blog homepage.

Dolly is delicious

Sometimes you can struggle for weeks to find inspiration, much to your frustration. Other times, it can come up and smack you in the face like a wet trout screaming “Hello! I’m a typeface, and I am gorgeous!“.

A few months ago, I chanced upon this post on the QBN Sessions website over at the FontFeed blog, and found it quite difficult to ignore the header type. A serif face that felt delightfully warm.

I’m talking of Dolly, and upon seeing this site I felt compelled to try it out. So I grabbed the font, a few design elements from previous designs of this site and some images from iStockphoto, and got to work.

An example of me trying out Dolly

Delighted with how well Dolly works with 12/18px Helvetica, I moved on to try a rough article layout.

The previous example extended into an article layout

I loved it. Dolly works wonderfully with the Antidisinformation colour scheme and with the design elements already there. In fact, so impressed was I with the typeface that I decided to incorporate Dolly into the next redesign of the site.

This resulted in the disaster below which I’ve since abandoned, surprisingly enough — though not entirely. This can be considered a first draft of the new homepage design.

An abandoned homepage design

This is an Article. It was posted on January 23, 2008.

5 Comments

  1. David Barrett on Jan 24, 02:19 pm

    Des mentioned to me after posting this that he’s delighted to see that he’s my only reference; though if I was him, I wouldn’t be too proud of my words.

  2. Des Traynor on Jan 25, 12:11 pm

    Lorum Ipsum is, of course, latin for

    Don’t hire this guy, he’ll rip you off and do your missus

    One reason you’ve no comments is that your site takes about 7 hours to actually post a comment, and your textile formatting is broken.

  3. David Barrett on Jan 25, 05:04 pm

    Yeah, a lot of people seem to be complaining about the performance of TextPattern on TextDrive, which is rather amusing considering that the creator of TextPattern founded TextDrive.

    No solution yet, but I’m working on it.

  4. David Barrett on Jan 25, 05:44 pm

    I’ve made some tweaks… apparently the default spam blacklist is very slow in TextPattern is very slow, so I’ve removed that and things seem to be running a bit faster.

  5. Eric B on Jan 25, 08:50 pm

    I’m glad to see I’m not the only one on the net who is constantly seeking to change/tweek/mod his blog. It’s nice to see the “mistakes” or what you have abandoned. I would like sometimes to be able to see what I had and then changed. Interesting read.

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