Martin Hähnel

Use The Default - Visual Design Cheat Code

Changelog

Note

I'm not a very visual person. I think you could tell by looking at the photos I take (e.g. my DailyDogos) and how my stuff more generally tends to look - the design and colors and everything else. Which is to say: Pretty basic. But to me that is also a cheat code. This blog uses the basic theme from eleventy-base-blog (which is the starter template I used to create this blog initially). This basic theme is very readable, has a very simple construction and I like its compact layout. It comes with a dark and light mode. In short: It is a reasonable default choice for people like me that are more about structure and less about presentation.

This is not to say that I wouldn't add features or change things here and there. I added, for example, a very simple theme toggle. Since I find light themes often visually overwhelming I spent my days around 100% in dark mode. But I may want to see how the site looks when viewed in light mode. Now I can. Is this a visual design thing? Not really. It is a feature of the blog for sure. The way I struggle to find a place for the button and how to style it - which is why it looks basic and unstyled right now - is a great example of why I tend to go with the default design of a thing.

I'm sure that I will figure out where to put the button and how to style it at some point. And I'm also sure that if a place and style is found that is acceptable, that this "solution" to this particular design mini-problem will just be used over and over again.

Another example is the main navigation next to my name: To not break the layout on mobile I'm limited to these six items. I could maybe use a magnifying glass for the search page and a feed icon for the feed and fit another link there - and I might do that - but what I'm not going to do is reinvent the navigation portion of my blog's layout.

A screenshot showing of the main navigation portion of this blog. There is an unstyled theme toggle button there and apart from my name also these navigation items: Home, Archive, About, Garden, Search, Feed.

So this light-touch approach of mostly using the basic layout as-is and only playing within the margins of said layout otherwise ensures a somewhat ok looking blog without getting bogged down in the parts of web development I'm not so good at (and more importantly: enjoy less).

So yeah: I'm more about features and structure and less about presentation. I hope that over time "small solutions" (like where to put the theme toggle button) will anyways lead to a unique looking site. But this is what it is right now. And that's ok.