The design grew out of thoughts on Western type and print versus Chinese typography and calligraphy. A balanced elastic interface seemed to fit, so everything stretches including content images. In fact, there are no presentational or background images at all, only content. You could call it an attempt at pure information design. It’s the same ethic that makes Chinese calligraphy simple and articulate, and lets all newspapers have a beauty all of their own, just from the anatomy of the type.
Depending on your platform, Baskerville or Palatino Linotype are used for headers and incidental text, Georgia for the body. Times New Roman is used for the stacked decorative type in the index masthead. For those lucky enough to be viewing this on a Mac, you may even notice the rare appearance of an italic Cochin.
The content is managed using a Grow blog application built in PHP called Lifelong File. Credit goes to Paul Whitrow for the initial work, but particularly to Jon Gibbins, who’s tireless work behind the scenes has qualified him for the “Free Cider At My House Award” for 2007–8. Jon is also responsible for the extracts of my del.icio.us bookmarks, Twitter moments and Upcoming events using a modified version of MagpieRSS rather than the APIs.
Microformats feature heavily around the site and will continue to be added as time allows. Other features close to my heart are also planned, from weighty tomes like OpenID support to Mills and Boon fun stuff like Gravatars. Now I’ve said it, it has to happen!