Typography Addict

"Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration." -- Jeffrey Zeldman

I have recently taken a leap off the deep end in terms of understanding typography. I've spent the better part of this morning breaking my site down and trying to make sure that every line of text in columns that are side-by-side have common baselines. The whole obsession began with this article: http://tomayko.com/writings/administrative-debris

The main concern of this essay is to remove all distraction from content. So I have attempted to do that with my personal site (http://nirmalpatel.com). My main focus other than using only typography to highlight the various levels of my site is to maintain an elastic design. Designing a site in this way means that the layout is proportional to the font size. Go to my site and zoom the text up/down a bit and come back. While this doesn't seem to important at first, once I did it I felt warm and fuzzy. This is different from a fixed design or even a fluid design. For more details read this ALA article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elastic/

In the end I have combined a minimal color scheme (white, gray, black, light blue) with elastic/content-centric design to make my site something I am definitely ok with accepting even though I will never be satisfied.

My recent inspirations have been:

http://jontangerine.com/
http://tomayko.com/
http://diveintomark.org/

If you are seeing my site and don't have Baskerville as one of your fonts please get it. It is much prettier than Georgia. If you have a Mac, don't worry.