This spring it will be three years since I hung out the Pilcrow shingle, and this is now my third version of the website.

Pilcrow 1

The first version of this site was extremely plain and simple. It was my first attempt at a standards-compliant site. I had just read Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards and my sole concern was learning this thing called XHTML. I didn’t care too much what the site looked like. I just wanted the code to be valid. Thankfully, not even a screenshot exists any more.

Pilcrow 2

Pilcrow 2 was much prettier. I found a lovely photo of an inkwell at iStockphoto, and I had learned enough CSS tricks that I could incorporate image replacement techniques and fancy hover effects on the navigation links:

In fact, there was nothing wrong with the site at all. It did a perfectly adequate job of displaying my wares. And I still like the way the background color changed on each page.

However, I didn’t use any content management system. I simply typed up the code in plain text and uploaded the pages to my server. This was fine — I like typing code! — except that it made for a very static site. Before long I found myself wanting something more dynamic, a place to post articles and resources, a place to write about my work and become a more active participant in the web design community. I toyed with the idea of starting a separate blog, but finally decided just to do it right here.

Pilcrow 3

Three things inspired the design of Pilcrow 3. The first was this website, which I believe I stumbled upon via Smashing Magazine:

I think this site is absolutely stunning. I love its vertical lines, its bright colors, and all the whitespace. Most of all, I love the combination of fixed-width main column and liquid sidebar, which I will write about in more detail in a future post. As you can see, though, Pilcrow 3 has a similar layout. If you resize your browser window, the sidebar, but not the main column, will expand or contract to fill the space.

My second source of inspiration was this font. I’m not a big impulse-buyer in general, but the moment I saw this one, I bought it. Because I just knew it would make the perfect logo for me:

The only thing not perfect? Ha ha, wouldn’t ya know, its pilcrow:

Not that there’s anything wrong with it — but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for my logo. So I had to fire up Illustrator and see what I could do to manipulate the capital P…

Last but not least, my third source of inspiration was a color palette I found over at ColorSchemer. I think it was called Autumn Harvest. Anyway, it included the shades of orange and olive you see here, which I adore.

In conclusion…

I’m very excited about my new site! I look forward to taking my blogging in a new direction, and I would greatly appreciate your feedback, if you made it this far.