Kenneth Ballenegger

Angel Investor, Engineer, Startup Founder
This blog is no longer updated and remains online as an archive.
7th
Apr
2012
 2 Kudos

Over the past week, I’ve quietly redesigned this blog to be somewhat up to my current standards. Before, I was using a customized version of Jake Paul’s theme, Solstice, which while attractive, was not my own work. There were quite a few things I wanted to achieve with this redesign: Most importantly, I wanted to have clear and easily legible typography on articles. This is, after all, a blog, and must serve its primary function above all. I also wanted to give myself a unique and somewhat more consistent personal brand, which I think this succeeds in doing. I wanted the header to be a window into a photographic snapshot. It will be either selected randomly from a selection of my best shots, or updated on a semi-regular schedule. The end goal being: to push myself to take more and better photos, more often. Lastly, I wanted to try to use some cool modern technologies and ideas. The header uses subtle parallax scrolling, which I think looks gorgeous. The styles is done in a LESS stylesheet, which makes coding CSS a breeze. I’m using semantic HTML 5 tags, like header and article, and using a few CSS3 animations. All in all, this was a fun and light coding exercise. For a fun easter egg, click the little expand icon at the very top-left of any page. Overall, I’m very satisfied with the result, but will no doubt keep tweaking it over time. Credit where credit is due: I’ve drawn inspiration from many places, including: Sebastiaan de With, Dustin Curtis, and Hero's parallax header. I also used Andy Davies' pattern, light wool.

Over the past week, I’ve quietly redesigned this blog to be somewhat up to my current standards. Before, I was using a customized version of Jake Paul’s theme, Solstice, which while attractive, was not my own work.

There were quite a few things I wanted to achieve with this redesign:

  • Most importantly, I wanted to have clear and easily legible typography on articles. This is, after all, a blog, and must serve its primary function above all. I also wanted to give myself a unique and somewhat more consistent personal brand, which I think this succeeds in doing.

  • I wanted the header to be a window into a photographic snapshot. It will be either selected randomly from a selection of my best shots, or updated on a semi-regular schedule. The end goal being: to push myself to take more and better photos, more often.

  • Lastly, I wanted to try to use some cool modern technologies and ideas. The header uses subtle parallax scrolling, which I think looks gorgeous. The styles is done in a LESS stylesheet, which makes coding CSS a breeze. I’m using semantic HTML 5 tags, like header and article, and using a few CSS3 animations. All in all, this was a fun and light coding exercise.

For a fun easter egg, click the little expand icon at the very top-left of any page.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the result, but will no doubt keep tweaking it over time.

Credit where credit is due: I’ve drawn inspiration from many places, including: Sebastiaan de With, Dustin Curtis, and Hero's parallax header. I also used Andy Davies' pattern, light wool.