Rebuilding SerialSeb.com – A new design

SerialSeb.com has existed for a very long time, but has received very little love. As the saying goes, “shoemaker’s wives go barefoot and doctor’s wives die young”.

I always knew I wanted something better, and wanted to start 2016 going back to basics and making sure my online presence reflected my principles better. I also realised that I spent most of my time tweeting, and little blogging. I love twitter, but it is ephemeral and the knowledge sharing doesn’t reach new people.

So I shelved the old site and, over the last 6 months of on and off work, I built something new, and moved everything over. I’ll attempt to do a little series of the various bits involved in moving things over.

A new look

A design ought to reflect your principles. I wanted something that focused on the content, a design that stayed out of the way while being recognisable instantly. The words “sharp”, “light”, “airy” come to mind.

I based the work on the excellent Minimal Mistakes template, which I customized heavily. Mind the fresh paint as many tweaks are still pending, especially on non-mac platforms.

A new brand

I always say that any project ought to start with a cool name and some logo. Back in the 90s, my online identity was technoboy, as I was a boy and very much into technology. I had to move on when my nicknames got stolen on the various IRC networks I was hanging out on, so thetechnologist was born around 2003, on various blogging sites, all of them now dead. The domain name expired and I lost it, so SerialSeb was born.

There are many reasons to chose a brand, but three are very important to me: google doesn’t know the term yet, the name matches the domain with which one wants to be identified, and it’s spellable without too much trouble. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of the word cereal back then, so now have to live with spelling it.

What I did not have was a logo. I wanted something simple, hand-crafted by myself, visibly recognisable from a distance and cheap to print. Combined with my love of highlighters, and an obsession with logos being a play on the name associated with it, I came up with this.

The double loop signifies continuity, and is a play on the two S in SerialSeb. The highlighter emphasizes the hand-crafted nature of what I do, and the blue is blue because it is apparently my favourite colour.

I’m not entirely settled on the shade of blue yet but one has to make concessions if one is to release things on time.

A new typography

Titles all come from Helvetica Neue, in two nuances. I played with hundreds of fonts since the early plans of redesigning SerialSeb.com in early 2013, which you can still see in some of my early slides.

It’s very light, very sharp, and I’m yet to find something else I like as much.

I’m still tweaking the design and will probably change both the font in use for text, the weight of various titles and the vertical whitespace, which I really don’t like much right now.

A one-stop shop

Finally, I’ve aggregated content from all my talks, my codebetter.com, blogspot.com, thetechnologist.net, and thetechnologist.is-a-geek.com blogs, the few blog entries about the book (more on that later), with my CV and all my slides to follow soon, basking in the glory of this new design.

It really is good to be back.