Redesign 2021

I've been thinking about redesigning and simplifying my website for quite some time now. I felt like the old design was both a bit over designed and too corporate—it didn't feel personal enough. It was time for a change.

I spent way too many hours in Figma doing a redesign before realizing I was on the same path once again. The fun redesign project started to feel like a burden and I didn't want to fall in the some over design hole once again. I decided going with a more quick redesign by skipping Figma and working mainly with regular HTML and CSS. This allowed me to work faster and eventually I was able to do most of the work in a single weekend.

Work in progress using Figma

I focused on using less color while maintaining a nice contrast for easier reading. I had plans for a dark mode and all sorts of bells and whistles like a Vue application for filtering the blog posts but again I decided to keep thing simply and just move on. I can always build more stuff in the future.

Screenshot of the previous design

I made sure to keep the website as accessible as possible. I added some much needed aria-attributes and alt texts to take care of most accessibility issues. There's still more work to be done but I'll try to work on this step by step.

The old design kept me from bloging for the longest time. Now with a fresh look I feel inspired to write again! I'll be making some domain changes as well to get further away from the corporate feeling Kauka brand towards a "I'm a normal person and this is my website" future. Because that just feels more genuine and more like me.

Let me know if you have any thought about the new design. Message me on Twitter with any feedback you might have!