Art Direction for Static Sites

A neat behind the scenes look at how Dave does his own art directed blog posts. Personally, I think he strikes a great balance between customizability and maintainability, with an elegant yet simple approach to how much he can tune each individual page.

Dave’s piece really makes me want to do art direction. However, I’ve done it in the past and I always felt like the custom styling got in the way of writing and publishing. And right now, I want to write—a lot.

That said, if I ever do venture the path of art direction anew, I might try one-off posts. Like this:

If you want to go all out and create the weirdest page on the Internet, you don’t have to hijack the system. You can eject from your layout entirely by choosing not to specify a layout. That alone gets you most of the way there! A page can be a hand coded page that atrophies at its own pace away from the parent styles is a great way to limit your technical debt.

That speaks to me. Once I publish, I never have to touch it again unless I want to, not because my site changes (which, let’s be honest, it inevitably will, about a million more times).