Updating on Design

I just jazzed up my professional portfolio website with variable fonts. Both Bild and Roslindale are designed by David Jonathan Ross and they are available at Font of the Month Club for discount prices.

I wanted to create a block of text and variable fonts make it easy to experiment in CSS. These days I design webpages exclusive in the browser. I keep playing around with different layouts and typefaces until I get the right feel for the design. That was how I came up with the design for Trịnh Công Sơn’s lyrics.

Designing with static comps, which I did for Thinkpoint, was a huge challenge. Even though the designer had given me the flexibility to design the way I saw fit, it was still difficult.

An old client has asked me to develop custom WordPress themes, but I turned her down. I have giving up on WordPress theming. Gutenberg had lost me. I can’t find any tutorial in which I can develop a theme from scratch. I would need to take a starter theme and run with it. The goal of Gutenberg is to make layout richer, but I see so much templated WordPress theme with a heavy baggage on performance. I still see lots of WordPress themes with common look and feel like full-screen photos, tiny text, boxes, gallery and so on.

I turned off the classic editor and switched to Gutenberg for this blog. It works fine. I just don’t have any block. That’s fine. I still want this site to remain as a blog and nothing fancy. I don’t care about rich content and photography. All I care about is typography. I want the editor to remain as simple as possible. It appears that Gutenberg has improved with the release of 5.2. As long as everything works as I expected, I am fine with using WordPress as it was intended for blogging. I hope that WordPress won’t abandon that.