New base58 design launched in September 2009

HELLO. The site’s been inactive for a few months because I’ve spent large chunks of the Summer working on this new design which seems to be working well enough now for me to go live with at last.

Over a year ago I first customised and integrated Flowplayer’s Flash-based video player on the site, enabling videos to be selected and viewed via a neat playlist system. Flowplayer’s jquery-based flexibility has thrived since then and the self-customised version you see on this site is a quantum leap in this site’s 9 year history, far more significant than the original custom video integration last year. For the first time ever I’ve got a site which can handle embedded video and audio the way I want it to! Pretty much…

With this new design I felt the most important thing was to embed video at a decent size. Not much point showing all these clips if they’re going to smaller than a credit card. YouTube’s new large display size of 640×360 was too big for me to be able to include a panel of the same width beside the player and I wanted to do this from the start. I’d always remembered the standard PAL D-1 resolution for digital video on computer monitors being 768×576 (and Premiere helpfully points it out too) so decided to base it on a 50% reduction of that but with widescreen adaptation of course. 512×288 seemed right. I’m justifying my unprecedented breaking into four digits for a website’s width on this basis.

This resolution size is now what I render videos at – how good it looks fullscreen now depends on the quality of the source material (often poor admittedly), but it’s all progress. This is not particularly important until I start producing much longer videos than the curent batch (unlikely as it stands).

So with the video size decided the rest of the layout was determind on that foundation. All navigation and control of video had to go alongside – nothing above or below. The reason for this was partly because I didn’t want the blog to start too low down, at over 300 pixels a height drop.

The increased width of the design meant two sidebars was now more acceptable. I found Igor Kovacic’s very good ‘Black3column’ template and adapted it accordingly – not much to change beyond selected css attributes and colours thankfully.

By far the most difficult part of this whole redesign process was customising the desired Flowplayer setup so that I could enable five different playlists to be controlled via toggled tabs. Much gnashing and wailing at several stages, coming close to giving up and having to abandon the re-dev for days on end for the preservation of sanity and some social life. But finally, eventually, it came together and the Eureka moments were worth all the aggro, just about…I’m chuffed to bits with it generally.

So there’s five playlists which are explained in the player content box for each tab. Splitting the video content up this way just makes it clearer what I’ve done in each case and the different aspects of video editing I enjoy. I would say that next year I’ll be getting more into original filming and maybe even 3D-based animation again with a view to directing my own music videos….but I said the same five years ago before the Ultramix project took over my life ack.

The blog design is much the same as before and fairly understated (rightly). I stand by the ‘everything at a glance/in one place’ concept although there is always a danger with this design of overwhelming people with too much info. This is why there is no elaborate imagery in the design itself although I do want to add some detail when I think of some that would be worthwhile enough and not just make the look much busier than it needs to be. For now it’s just three colours – white, black and my beloved “robin-egg blue” – my official brand colour, with dark and light variations of that were required.

The emblem was redesigned finally too. You only see it in the video player ‘test card’ because it would’ve taken up too much space in the header itself. A big improvement tho I hope you’d agree, if you cared ha. I’m sure it will be tweaked again before too long.

‘AgencyFB’ was the typeface I wanted to retain for the site (with Helvetica the only other font) so the title appears in that with a new hexagon motif for the ‘58′. With ‘base58′ not featuring on the emblem itself this acts as a little bonus monotone logo whoopty do.

More news about the new video player and video clips coming up in a separate post…