Colophon

Starting out, my goal in designing this site was to evoke the feeling of a printed book. This goal drove nearly all of the decisions I made during the design phase of the project.

Design

Layout

The content of this site is not structurally complex, so I settle on a minimalist layout. There is one column; it’s 480 pixels wide so that no changes need to be made for it to be readable on an iPhone.

Typography

This is the one aspect of the site that has taken me the longest to figure out. I knew that I wanted to restrict it to a single typeface, and I knew what I wanted it to look like. Through some research, I found the term for what I sought was a humanist serif typeface. For the moment, I’m usung Adobe Garamond served by Typekit, but I’m unhappy with how light the type is. Once I’m able to upgrade my Typekit account, I intend to switch over to HvD Livory.

Color

In keeping with the “printed book” theme, I wanted to keep the site to one color; however, when interacting with a web page, most users expect hyperlinks to be a different color from the rest of the text, and to change color once visited. To satisfy these expectations, links in the body text take on the traditional blue (normal), red (active), and purple (visited) colors, darkened slightly.

Development

This site is powered by the Jekyll site generator, with the layouts (HTML5 + CSS) and content (Markdown) written in TextMate 2. The recipe pages and index were done using Jekyll’s blogging features. For debugging, the Webkit page inspector was invaluable. The few images needed were made with Acorn.

Upkeep

All of the source files necessary to generate the site are kept in my Dropbox. I can edit them with TextMate on my laptop or with Elements on my iPhone or iPad. To push these updates to my site, I need only log into my server and run jekyll. On my laptop, this is easy; on my iOS devices, I use a Prompt profile set up with an SSH key and the appropriate initial command, so I can push changes with one click wherever I have an internet connection.