As I write this posting, this blog is about to do a visual switch, and by the time you read this, the switch may well have occurred. On the content front, nothing has changed. The same postings as always, the same inadequate and still unupdated links (these I will fix Real Eventually Now), the same comments.
But, there's now colour. I have in mind those blackboards they use nowadays, which aren't black any more as blackboards once were, but green – although if I really followed through with that idea I suppose I'd have white text on a much darker green background. The comments section now looks more consistent with the front page, and the archives have likewise been greened. As before, I've gone for serviceable and legible and easily loaded, rather than for outstanding beauty that you have to sit and wait for.
My more serious purpose is to have a blog look that will serve as the basis, with colour changes, for my other blog also, thereby proclaiming the two of them to the world as the brother-blogs that they are, this one being the sensible older brother and the other being the dodgy artistic one. My Culture Blog is now, somewhat embarrassingly, a visual mess, co-ordination between front page, comments and archives being non-existent. So my next blog task, once I am reasonably satisfied with the look of things here, will be to get that blog sorted. Then, I have in mind to be sorting the permanent content of both blogs, the links in other words, and also to find time to sort out the categorising of postings properly, which are now a shambles on both blogs. Then I'll be free to concentrate on the daily content. But I still only promise a post (and maybe more) every weekday about educational matters. All else is merely me guessing how things will unfold.
By all means comment on the new look of things if you wish to, but my understanding of graphic design is that it should satisfy not consumers but producers. If I like the way things now look, and I do, then I'll be happy topost lots of good stuff, and that way you'll like this blog because you like what it says. That being so, you'll learn to like how it looks, no matter what you now think of it. Far better a good read in visually undistinguished circumstances than stuff which looks as pretty as a picture but which is a poor read. Many are the magazines and journals whose days of glory coincided with a decidedly quirky visual appearance, and who went down the drain as soon as they started looking prettier.
Nevertheless, I hope that you also like it.
