Kickoff Of My Website Redesign

I love it when people share their decision-making process for design, artwork, or anything really. Frank Chimero recently did a wonderful redesign of his website where he documentated the process of his work. I figure I could do the same but add my own twist.

My site has been redesigned around 6 or 7 times. Usually the process consistents of creating a worpress theme based upon _s. I've create around 3-4 themes this way and really only like one. Some of the restrictions of using a CMS for me is having to design pages that I don't use, disabling settings for comments, plugins, and working with code that I didn't create. The control I have while working with just CSS, HTML, and JavaScript is way more attractive than fiddling with PHP that someone else wrote.

Here's some additional sources of inspiration for me.

• I've always been a huge fan of the way Jason Santa Maria art directs his posts.
• Grid Systems by Kimberley Elam is going to be sourced for the layout.
• There are so many typography resources I really don't know where to start. I think I'll revisit the MyFonts Newsletter, Typewolf, and Hoefler&Co.
• Maybe for colors I'll checkout Pantone and Kuler, but my heart is saying to use a muted version of Solarized for a base light and base dark color scheme. That doesn't really work well for art directing each page. Still figuring this out.
• I need to figure out what coding libraries I'm going to use. Tailwind, Angular, React, Bootstrap, maybe none.
• Other topics of interest for me are where could I use animation, what can I offer users my site, how can I help people, what's the best way to send updates, should I have an intro page, do I need a style guide, do I need a component library?

Hopefully this gets me on more of a roll with publishing to my site. I've had it for 16 years. It's time.