New Design!

It would be cool if I could claim that the reason for my non-blogging is that I have come up with a new design — but that would be a lie, since the guy who came up with it is Dirk Hesse, who has also recently done an excellent job for the innoQ main site. Most of the web designers I know are able to paint pretty pictures, but fail when it comes to produce “good” markup. Dirk does both (the fact that everything here is not so heavy on pictures is because of my taste), knows his way around MovableType, and in general knows what I want from him without me having to explain what, exactly, it is that I mean by “good markup”. I can only highly recommend his services.

Although he lives in Dortmund (which is about 50km from where I live), I got in touch with him because of a posting from the other side of the Atlantic. Zeldman about Dirk’s page:

This site would not win design awards: it doesn’t spin, burp, or pee; it is understated and probably cost almost nothing to produce. Such qualities go unrecognized in the world of big design competitions, but the problem is with the competitions. Good design is hard. Good minimalist design is even harder: like three chord rock.

Indeed.