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snide

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GB Redesign progress...

An example of a mock I give to our engineers to dread over.
An example of a mock I give to our engineers to dread over.
So I'm starting week 2 of actual CSS work on redesigning Giant Bomb. It's going amazingly well. You know you're digging the style when you get bummed out when you have to use the live site. The first steps were reworking all the core CSS (buttons, major layout classes...etc). If you've checked out the mocks you can imagine that this had me making lots and lots of rounded corners for various layout sections of GB. Using rounded corners, while better looking, drastically increase the complexity of a site's frontend code. For this reason I had sworn off the look a couple years ago, but like a lost lover, have embraced them again recently.

This week I'm mostly taking those core CSS changes and implementing them throughout the actual HTML on the site. That means I basically go through each and every page on the site and massage the new style into the old templates. It's pretty tedious work, but after having thrown together the original Giant Bomb in only 6 weeks it's nice to have time to spend fully on making the site prettier, instead of worry about functionality. Coonce is helping out as well, helping me out with the backend stuff that I can't do on my own. I'm very excited about everything, so much so that I've been regularly showing up back at the office after dinner to attack more templates. Right now I'm waiting on my local database to rebuild so I figured it'd be a good time for an update.

While I'm doing this Ethan is working on a MAJOR gallery/image management redo. The new stuff is all drag and drop and well... impressive. Basically we're banishing checkboxes from image management and trying to better define galleries and in turn fix a lot of those tools. Those changes will likely make it into the site before mine and will come in handy to some of our bigger image uploaders. Andy is working on some additions to our search functionality and working on requests from the API forums.

Mostly the things I'm most excited about is showcasing the crew downstairs content a little better. I think if you don't check the site everyday you can miss a lot of the funny vids they add to the site daily. Right now we do a pretty poor job at promoting vids, news, guides and user reviews on the game pages. I've reworked those pages the most and it's nice to see VInny's stuff float up better. In general I'm just happy with the way things are actually looking from a cleanliness perspective. I've tried to cut down the length of our pages without losing content. It's not the easiest thing to do, but I've spent a lot more time on font sizing and line heights this time to make things in general more readable.

In any case, that's what I'm up to. I'll likely add some screenshots to this post in a half hour or so when my local database is finished rebuilding. I guess that just leaves me raiding the vinyl collection at the office till the db is built. Right now Jackson Browne's Running on Empty is on. 
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