Joachim Breitner's Homepage

After 10 years I finally got around to re-decorating my website. One reason was ICFP, where just too many people told me that I don’t look like on my old website any more (which is very true). Another reason was that I was visting my brother, who is very good at web design (check out his portfolio), who could help me a bit.

I wanted something practical and maybe a bit staid, so I drew inspiration from typical Latex typography, and also from Edward Z. Yang’s blog: A serif font (Utopia) for the main body, justified and hyphenated text. Large section headers in a knobbly bold sans-serif font (Latin Modern Sans, which reasonably resembles Computer Modern). To intensify that impression, I put the main text on a white box that lies – like a paper – on the background. As a special gimmic the per-page navigation (or, in the case of the blog, the list of categories) is marked up like a figure in a paper.

Of course this would be very dire without a suitable background. I really like the procedural art by Jared Tarbell, espcially substrate and interAggregate. Both have been turned into screensavers shipped with xscreensaver, so I hacked the substrate code to generate a seamless tile and took a screenshot of the result. I could not make up my mind yet how dense it has to be to look good, so I for every page I randomly pick one of six variants randomly for now.

I simplified the navigation a bit. The old News section has been removed recently already. The Links section is gone – I guess link lists on homepages are so 90s. The section Contact and About me are merged and awaiting some cleanup. The link to the satire news Heisse News is demoted to a mention on the Contents section.

This hopefully helps to make the site navigatable on mobile devices (the old homepage was unusable). CSS media queries adjust the layout slightly on narrow screens, and separately for print devices.

Being the nostaltic I am, I still keep the old design, as well as the two designs before that, around and commented their history.