Design Refresh

At long last, I am ready to unveil the project that I have been working on over the summer - a design refresh for site. The main drive behind this aesthetic: I noticed the sheer abundance of information that the basic octopress theme gives you. This setup leads to a lot of duplicate information that ultimately makes things feel cluttered. I tried to keep things very minimal in this design, eliminating as much overlapping information and noise as possible.

I used a few different models for the design of the site. The main inspirations came from the sites of Jeremy Boggs, and Daniel Carter. There are still a few things that I could stand to change for this current design, but it felt as thought it was time to let the current iteration see the light of day.

A couple issues I ran into:

How minimal is too minimal in an aesthetic like this? I am not crazy about the search bar in the navigation setup, but it does feel necessary to have one. The function there outweighed the desire to keep the aesthetic. In a future refresh, I will probably try to make the search bar a bit more subtle. In addition, at one point I had my links only turn blue when hovered. This looks great, but it presents obvious problems: you never know what is a link. Again, I had to make some sacrifices for the site to function properly.

How to deal with images in a minimal aesthetic? I initially wanted to have some sort of a banner image at the top where my name serves as a heading. I might explore this in the future, but images offer whole new complications. What kind of image texture would keep the aesthetic alive? Content? Color? I punted the issue for now by opting for my name as the banner, but I will be returning to this in the future.