Going for that ‘sleaze’ look

sweasel.com, if you please.

I decided to go with a sleazy tabloid look for my blog. Low end. Like, REAL low end. The sort of paper they give away for free at the supermarket.

For one thing, I knew it would be graphics heavy, and grayscale images store so much smaller. A newspaper approach would allow me to run with very little white space — which I was going to do anyway. I was once told my sense of composition is a train wreck.

I wanted lots of busy little newspapery things happening in the sidebars. To avoid making it too distracting, I decided to limit the dynamic range of these graphics (nothing is quite as light as white or as dark as black). I also created most of them with a few solid shades of gray, so they could be stored as very small indexed .gif files. The intent was to improve load time as well as eyeball strain.

Still very much a work in progress, but I’d appreciate feedback. Especially as regards load time and general annoyingness of all the STUFF happening on the page.

I design on a laptop with a high resolution settings, so it sometimes looks way too large and in your face on a normal size monitor at a lower res.