Hello. Away from the ordered chaos of the front page, you may be wondering what this is. The answer is the personal site of Joel Parr and a mish-mash of all of the little bits of stuff that are in some way associated with me and spread across the internet. From the 140 character missives on Twitter to the photos I post on Flickr, via the links I save on Delicious and now, finally a few blog posts as well.

The content is a mixture of a blog, a portfolio of my web and design work, a place to post photos and a Tumblelog (what?). Despite having dabbled with the world of blog authorship on a couple of occasions since I first created one way back in 2001 (kind of glad I didn’t stick with that domain – Urban Dictionary it), this marks my first proper go, 9 years later. For someone who’s terrible for not devoting enough time to personal projects, keeping this ticking over is something of a daunting prospect.

In case you’re wondering, the site takes it name from a poem, All Kinds of Trouble by Abigail Burdess. I don’t profess to be a poetry expert, but I know I like this one. Oh, and the one on the right too.

Design Notes

The site was originally designed around a custom, 13 column grid using Adobe Photoshop. It conforms to a baseline grid and you can see both by pressing and holding your G-key (functionality provided by the wonderful #grid).

Main headings are designed to be set, where available, in H&FJ’s Hoefler Text with supplementary headings set in Gill Sans and navigational sub-headings using Raleway (thanks to the revolutionary TypeKit). Finally, body copy is set in Lucida Grande with Georgia for italics.

With most of this stuff, if you’re using Internet Explorer your mileage may vary – heavily. And yes, the shapes are supposed to overlap the content.

Technical Notes

The front-end of this site was forged purely by hand using an  Apple Macintosh. It was coded in HTML5 with smatterings of CSS3. It is built as a custom theme on version 3.1 of the WordPress platform and any and all markup errors should be courtesy of its hateful WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE.

If you would like to validate the HTML or check the CSS please do so and feel free to report any problems you may find. No moaning about CSS3 causing the validator to fail though please, that’s not my fault.