I usually refresh the design around here by the end of year, and this one comes with some big news, and a little tweak. So, the big news, for the first time in over 10 years, MacManX.com has a logo! Sure, I had a favicon ever since this site started, but it was really just a scaled version of what my header image was when I started out. It was old, low-res, and irrelevant today, which brings me to the new logo, courtesy of friend and co-worker José Marques. The new logo incorporates my favorite shades of blue, along with two M’s and an X (MMX = MacManX), plus it kind of looks like a falcon, and it’s totally awesome.
The small tweak was to the fonts. After being on very slow wi-fi last month, I realized that web fonts are actually kind of lame. If you’re on a slow connection, you sit there looking at a site completely devoid of content while the fonts are downloaded on demand. They look beautiful, and there’s really something to be said about finding the perfect font for your site out of thousands, but the functional tradeoff just isn’t worth it, plus there are some sketchy things to be said about Google Fonts. I went with the Arial family, a font family which is installed by default on over 95% of desktop and mobile devices, and I’d like to give a special shout out to CSS Font Stack for making that choice easy.
I’m very happy with Sorbet, so nothing else has changed. The site should load quicker now without the web fonts (except Genericons, which I’m keeping, because it’s still lighter than using images for the icons), and there’s a great new logo to tie everything together. A huge thanks again to José Marques for the logo, and to friends and colleagues Kathryn Presner and Richard Spees, for always being there to help out when styles misbehave!