I took a few minutes today to change up the way the site looks. I thought the original design felt a little heavy. It didn't seem to be the palette, but rather how it was employed. The fonts were a bit too big, and the background, while part of the palette and doing an okay job putting a focus on the content, was a bit too dark. I relieved these issues with a minimum of design changes by reducing the font size, moving the content to the right, and making lots of room for a background that employs a natural element with an architectural element.

The image that I used is the same as the one on my Twitter page. It's the Grafton Peace Pagoda, a shrine to nuclear non-proliferation in the mountains of Rensselaer County, New York. There's also a Peace Pagoda in San Francisco, so it sort of reflects where I come from and where I'm going.

In some ways, this change also reflects my recent travels to Spain, where I spent a lot of time marveling at Gaudi's Barcelona. While in no way related to any of Gaudi's work, the Grafton Peace Pagoda has a similar integration with nature. Like Las Pedreras, or multiple components of Parc Guell, it interacts with the sky by using light-colored materials with lots of upward direction.

The blog portion is excluded from major design changes, as I have a high emphasis here on readability and blog-related actionability. It also gives me an opportunity to play with two designs at once.

In other news, my first two weeks in Burlingame have been fairly crazy. Between getting situated in a new city (let alone a new state!), diving right into developing new processes to streamline existing workflows, and going onsite to the McAfee Focus10 conference in Las Vegas, I've got my hands pretty full.

In the last month, I spent ten days in Spain (get the rabbit dinner at Meson Gregorio III and tell Javier I say hola!), drove across the country in three days (pulling a U-Haul trailer and downshifting up and downhill like a big rig trucker), and flew to Vegas to support our system at work. I'll be looking forward to relaxing a bit and exploring the Bay Area once everything settles down.

Given all the stress, fiddling with this site design has been a little therapeutic, so I hope you enjoy how it looks!