This site has been a developing project, and the design and layout has been updated frequently. There is a separate version history of the site, with a list of the main changes and some screenshots.
Page Measurements
Version 4 was 810 pixels wide. The measurements inside this were effectively arbitrary as they had been adjusted from time to time “to make things look nice” without any overall plan.
Version 5 was planned on squared paper as a five column layout. The overall width of the site is 864 pixels. Each column is 144 pixels, and the margins are 24 pixels. (There are six margins which add up to another 144 pixels.)
Therefore the width of the page is divided up as follows:
= 24 + 144 + 24 + 144 + 24 + 144 + 24 + 144 + 24 + 144 + 24
= 720 (5 x 144) + 144 (6 x 24)
= 864px
The five columns are mostly conceptual in that the actual pages usually consist of a single four-column text block with a one colöumn sidebar. There are, however, two occasions when the columns are realised in practice.
Firstly, the front page has two two-column columns for headlines. Secondly images obey the column widths.
Images
One column images are 144 pixels wide. They have a 24 pixel right or left margin. Two column images are 312 pixels wide, with the same margins. Four column images are 640 pixels wide with left and right margins of 4 pixels.
The formatting and styling of images is described in more detail here.
Colours
There are two key colours used throughout the site:
#4477CC blue, and
#FFCC66 yellow/orange.
#FFEBC2 is used for the body background in version 5. (In previous versions it was #EEEEEE.)
Mastheads
For version 1, I made a design for the masthead, using two images from William Blake: Nabakanazar and Pity. These were collaged, with their backgrounds blended and mutated to fit together. The width of the masthead was stretched for versions 3 and 4.
In April 2007, for version 5, I made a new masthead that collaged several land masses, two skies and a plane. This was then tinted to match the site colours.
Fonts
The font for the first masthead was a freeware font called Damage, the origins of which I have lost.
In April 2007 I changed the font in the masthead to Deranged Tabloid, which was created in 1997 by Timm Suess (sokrates [at] datacomm.ch)