Website Redesign Ideas

Design Inspirations

Lapham’s Quarterly: typography, design
The New Yorker: in-depth articles
Quartz : mobile-friendly, with annotations[ref]watch the 1 min video showing how to annotate Quartz[/ref]
Bible gateway: textual comparison
NYMag.com: interview with hover sidenotes[ref]hover over the footnoted text to see the sidenotes in the Jon Stewart interview[/ref]
Medium.com: article with pictures
Ted Nelson: textual connections demo[ref]It takes a while to load, so don’t give up, thinking its a blank page. Wait for the main content to load[/ref]
Johnathan Nicol: typography

I like the idea of “clean”/simple design with nice typography
I like the idea of mostly black/white, with shades of grey
I like the links to be blue.
- example: links and headers start darker and fade into lighter grey when you hover over them.
The color for the site will come from the photos and video

I want the site to feature lots of linking/footnotes, because I’m exploriing the work of Ted Nelson and his ideas about parallel hypertext.

David Foster Wallace is another influence. He used over 400 footnotes in his novel “Infinite Jest.” I’m not going to do that, but I want to suggest that approach through the design of my site.

I’m using two wordpress plugins to make my site more reference-able:

Side Matter: uses tagging to generate notes (like footnotes, but on the side)
Inline Comments: people can comment on a specific paragraph, rather than just dumping their comments at the end of the page.

Sidebar:
- front page/writing: content & sidebar with sidenotes, tags, featured content, etc
- interviews: content & sidebar with sidenotes, tags, featured content, etc
- tagging: content & sidebar with tags, etc

No Sidebar:
- quotes : no sidebar, though I may would like to add tags to the bottom of the “quotes” section (where it says “source” & “read more”), if it would look ok.