329 days ago, I changed the masthead of this site. Today, I’ve changed it back.

The bold italic Verdana version I’ve reinstated today was always a key part of the site’s identity. Until 329 days ago, I’d used it for almost seven years. Barring a font and colour change, the logo had been the same since for almost nine years. As I’ve been tidying things up in the site design this week, I’ve been taking inspiration from some of the old layouts. Looking at them, it seemed clear to me that ditching that original logo was a mistake: the replacement was weaker, with fewer elements yet somehow less cohesion. So I’ve brought the old one back.

If you’re reading this on the site, you’ll notice that I’ve redesigned the “default” post template to a fairly radical degree. This includes bolder headlines (in the slightly quirky font used in the logo I’ve just ditched), and a plain white background (based on readers’ feedback). I hope too that it looks a little more formal. My thinking was that most of the casual content I post now has its own template, so the content using this template is likely to be my more formal news commentary and the like. This post clearly excepted…! I haven’t applied this design retrospectively, because elements of the contents of those posts were designed to fit the old template.

I’ve reduced the amount of advertising on the site, removing ad spaces that were only bringing in the barest trickle of revenue. There are countless other tweaks to the design across the site, too, and I hope the overall effect is that it looks a little bit tidier. I hope the font tweaks make reading the text a little easier, too. Feel free to leave any suggestions, observations, moans, etc in the comments.