I had recently thought that maybe another redesign of award tour was in order. I really liked the concept of tumblelog’s and enjoyed the minimal themes over at tumblr.

Well, as fate would have it, I accidentally deleted my previous theme (the green one, along with all the images I had in posts plus any mp3s I ever posted) while doing a simple wordpress upgrade. It also turned out that I didn’t have a backup. So instead of bemoaning my loss, I decided to implement my new more tumblelog-like version of award tour. And don’t get me wrong, ‘fuck’ was yelled several times when I realized my mistake.

I quickly came across a tumblelog theme for wordpress called typographic. After using this as a starting point I quickly realized that I was using some big dirty hacks to make it look they way I want across multiple browsers. The last thing I wanted was to start coding something up which was going to be a giant fragile hack. This seemed like the perfect excuse to finally try out blueprint css.

Blueprint is a collection of CSS files which let you create easily create css grids and does a pretty good job of setting your text on a baseline (here’s an article about why you might want to baseline your text). Having used Yahoo’s UI Grid, I can tell you that blueprint is much more intuitive to use. I probably had the biggest parts of my layout switched over in under an hour. This is possibly because blueprint doesn’t allow you to create a fluid grid. As this wasn’t a concern from me, I can say that blueprint is awesome.

After that, I probably spent a couple hours hooking in comments which, for some reason, was totally left out of the typographic theme. Then I spent the last 6 or so hours polishing up a collection of small details. No matter what kind coding or designing I’m doing, I’m always suprised how much time the small details take. I guess an app really is just “a collection of tiny details“.