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The blog before I changed it[/caption]In a previous post, I described how I initially decided on the look for my Knower's Arc blog. Now everything has to change: function, layout, appearance and content. It's nice when you get it right at the start (which I didn't). Otherwise you need to intervene and fix it. Here goes.
a new function
There are two ways in which I generate material for my Theory of Knowledge course: I create online slideshows to support the teaching and I collect online stimuli to inspire student presentations. I would like to curate all of these materials in one place. Thus, the blog needs to acquire pages where my resources will live.
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Now it's a blogsite[/caption]a new layout
I considered a few alternatives (Google sites, Wordpress, Weebly, Wix, Wikispaces, Squarespace...) but eventually decided to stay put on Blogger rather than re-build the site from scratch. Beside the existing blog and tag cloud, I have created pages to house resources for each of the main topics (about 20). It's pretty text heavy, but that seemed to me the most efficient way for all of the links to be on the homepage. The categories are based on the course organisation which all of its users understand. You can't tell, maybe, but there were many versions of the layout before I arrived at this which works best for me. I also changed the picture but I couldn't say why I chose the new one. It looked right.
a new appearance
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Goethe's wheel connects colour and emotion[/caption]Leonardo, Newton and Goethe all had theories which expressed their beliefs about what colour is and the emotion it evokes. They did not agree. None of them knew anything about hexadecimal colour codes which reduce all colour to a logical system understood by websites. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed by modern designers that colour and emotion are related. Do all cultures react the same way to colours though? Some research suggests not. So maybe someone's colour theory tells us more about the person than about colour itself. If you're going to break the rules, though, it's better to know them.
My first colour scheme combined colours from van Gogh's paintings. I suppose I thought that one of art's great aesthetic sensibilities couldn't be wrong, but why should that work for an entirely different purpose? Time to try something different. I'm not going to use someone else's palette. I'll make my own.
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Paletton.com's wheel is based on logic[/caption]Paletton.com is an amazing free tool. This is my chance to play with it. I used it to make some themes.
- Monochromatic blue based on a tone in the banner photo which I sampled with the excellent ColorZilla Chrome extension.
- Triad yellow based on van Gogh's sunflowers + two adjacent colours chosen by eye).
- Triad purple based on the colour of my Physics website + two distant colours chosen by eye.
- Tetrad of colours separated by Golden Ratio.
Flick through the slides to see the four schemes I tried.
In this process, I have learned a lot about colour; triads and tetrads; brightness, saturation and hue. In the end though, I will use the green theme just because it looks right to me. The colours are quite restful which I think may be due to their proximity in the wheel (but it's an emotional rather than a rational choice). I am too close to the result to judge whether it is actually an upgrade.
What I have learned about resources which are created online is that they are never finished. If you look at the KA blog today, you will probably see a different version from the one below.
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The final version for now[/caption]
