I’ve been tooling around with the site a bit and and have done my best to remove the limited brand element and navigation from the site. Here’s why.
Visually the site name and navigation were getting in my way. They acted like a nice focal axis for the default design of the site but as I began creating custom content they began to influence my decisions about what I could and wanted to do. I want to use backgrounds of different patterns and colors but always had to take them site name and menu into account. I want to use different grids. I want to use centered layouts. I want the content to help brand the site not a yellow stripe.
So, if I can’t put them on the left side and treat them like a book spine where can I put them. Well, the logical and boring place is right at the top spanning the width of the page horizontally. This doesn’t remove it from the design of the page in my mind and would make using different grids look odd. It was also to dominating visually. I couldn’t make that compromise. Maybe running along the bottom of the page, but for longer articles they would have to slide behind an absolutely positioned div. I hate that, couldn’t do it.
After some thinking I decided to put it up in the left hand corner and allow the user—mostly me—to put it where ever they saw fit depending on the page they’re on. Maybe it is a novelty and I’ll get tired of it after a while but for now I feel free to use the entire canvas of the browser.
In addition I’ve cleaned up some of the code. I’ll post more about how I accomplished the dragging functionality later.
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