I am unsure what to blog about this week. But I thought maybe I would go through my choices for the type assignment and give a sense of where I am thinking of taking the design.

My goal for the overall design was to promote readability and to provide a clean, but pleasant framing for the material. The left sidebar contains some of the metadata for the site. My thought here was to make citation as easy as possible, and so both publishing information and the copyright restrictions that Richard set up are visible. I also added some anchor tags to allow for some navigation in the text – this will be easier and more obvious with some of the other texts I am dealing with. Another thought for future iterations is linking to either pdf or epub versions of the text so that the pieces can be downloaded easily.

The background for the site is an image I made (or attempted to make) in Photoshop. I wanted to experiment with a fixed background, so that the page had the effect of only the text moving. The text comes from the Book of Common Prayer, but the ratio between the image and the content is too large to make any sense of the words. I had hoped to make the background faded, but I think I will need to wait until I have a better handle of Photoshop to accomplish that.

The color choice is a desperate attempt to move away from what I have discovered is my obsession with sage. The “dusty rose” effect on the activated links works but is not my favorite. But I do like the background being an off-white. I think it makes the text gentler on the eyes for reading.

I used a variety of fonts for the project. I am using Typekit for the header – the font is Great Primer. The other fonts I downloaded from The League of Moveable Type. I used Fanwood Text for the main text and Sorts Mills Goudy for the titles and everything else. I am happy with Fanwood for the major text sections; it has pleasant spacing and line height.

Overall I am happy with how this has turned out, but of course, I have stared at it so long that I’ve become attached! Any suggestions are welcome!

Update: I commented on Claire’s and Beth’s post this week.