Tonight I was working on the layout of an up-and-coming install of Motivated Hamsters when I hit a roadblock that could only be overcome with lots of Helvetica. (Unfortunately, lots of Helvetica isn’t exactly right for the new site.) Rather than waste all that hard work, I spent a few minutes tweaking things and moved it all over here as a sort of the first step in a larger design refresh.

I used the 16 column version of Nathan Smith’s Grid 960 system to hold everything together, I’d noodled around with it before and really liked it. It’s dead simple to get your head around and ultimately flexible.

It also means the site is about 200 pixels wider than it used to be, which makes for a ton more room to show things like neat little infographics on the permalink pages.

The plan is to keep swapping out pieces of the site over time, starting with rethinking things like the header and the sidebar, and sprinkling in little bits of data where it makes sense. Eventually, I’d like to put something less austere together — but who am I kidding really, every time I try that I take it apart because it’s too busy.

Bug reports are appreciated, and Windows folks will just have to be happy with Arial. If you’re keeping score, this is the 8th version of nicholasjon.com to grace your display.