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File Me Away

Posted on March 13th, 2006 by Shane

File Me Away is a Movable Type Blog containing “the random ramblings of Josh Lehman and friends.” Josh is a graphic designer in Texas, and that shows through very distinctly in this site. I’ll tell you what I mean.

The site is an absolute visual delight. From the Texas theme in the header, to the matching woodgrain background, to the section separators that make the page look like real pages in a notebook — it’s just so nice. He also makes light, but effective use of sIFR to make his post titles look especially polished.

I’m a really big fan of highly customized blogs, and he has done a great job customizing this one. It very much breaks the standard mold to create a site that is both well structured and easy to read. He’s done a fantastic job.

Finally, there are some nice hidden features that make the site quirky and interesting — just don’t expect me to ruin the surprises by pointing them out to you.

Alas, the site has a dark side, though :) As you would expect from someone who is primarily a graphic designer, the quality of the design isn’t matched by the quality of the code behind it. Start by turning off images, and you’ll see that the whole site degrades into gray text on a brown background, which is made even more awkward by the sporadic text in white boxes. It wouldn’t take much effort to make the site degrade much better.

The site also doesn’t take full advantage of CSS — instead just relying heavily on the images to give it its very nice look and feel.

All-in-all, it reminds me a lot of The Traveling Guys — what’s in front of the curtain is much more polished than what’s behind. For Josh, though, that only makes sense. He got the site he was looking for without spending several more hours on the back end — hours he probably spent with his new Little Lehman.

So for me, this site is much more an example of great design and the possibilities of what can be done with a blog than it is a university-level case of CSS usage. Still, the first two were so impressive, I felt that this site deserved mention.

Let us know what you think!

Tags: Blog, Dark Background, Graphic Background, Movable Type, U.S.

Rated 6.2 from 23 votes

More Opinions on File Me Away

Visually it doesn’t stand out in any aspect. Take away the woodgrain background and it’s one in a thousand. And, as you said, the code is horrible. On top of that it presents JavaScript errors.

To put it simple: This “style” is hardly “unmatched”.

– drmr
I agree with drmr, not one thing looks nice about this really and lacks originality. The code is, as noted — horrible.

– trevor
Haaaa! You guys should leave the use of hyperbole to professionals. You’re brandishing it around so wildly, someone’s liable to lose an eye.

– Shane
not really, Shane…

… badges, paper, wood background..

Its a nice design but nothing sets it apart from anything else, except maybe the code seems either quite old, their first attempt at joinin the “semantic web” or just plain lazy to clean it up.

– trevor
pretty well done,
code sucks as said before,

i dont really like wood backgrounds but this one was done great.

– Sasan
Wow… horrible code? I can certainly understand “bad” code, or “weak” code… but horrible?

I may not have spent the time to perfect it, but for me it comes down to a time/cost assessment. This is my personal blog site…. visited by like 20 - 30 people, and maybe my mom. My audience (if you can call it that) is 95% firefox and safari users so I built the site FOR that audience. I could have spent another 10 hours on the thing getting it up to “standards perfection” but based on the return I’d get by doing that I decided it wasn’t worth it.

Finally, I’m still learning… yes, I’m very new to web standards and understanding their full benefits.

I appreciate the thoughts… but calling the code “horrible” without any solid examples doesn’t really help the web standards movement in my opinion.

I appreciate Shane’s pointing out a few things I can work on… which I will implement (such as fixing the background colors).

Finally… the “badge” is 100% sarcasm (hence the “now with never before seen footage” line). It’s meant to poke fun at the ubiquitous nature of the eye-catching “badge” in web design these days. As for the “paper calendar on wood background” look… I haven’t seen it in too many places myself. Maybe I just don’t get around enough on the web. :)

– Josh
I didn’t do a very good job enforcing the comment guidelines on this one, and Josh has had a chance to give his thoughts now, so I’m going to restrict the comments on this one from here on out to those that add something new to the discussion.

– Shane
I think it’s pretty good - many of the elements are simple but that doesn’t mean its not well designed.

As for the code, it doesn’t look that bad to me either. It might not be top notch but it doesn’t use inline styles, tables, div soup or anything “horrible” ;)

Cute kid too. Keep up the good work

– Dragon
Well designed, but I dont like the colours of the site and the photo of the header.

– Salento

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