I’ve also updated all the thumbnail images in the portfolio, after I figured out which Inkscape setting was degrading the quality. If you go into Inkscape Settings, then Bitmaps and set the ‘Oversample bitmaps’ setting to ’16×16′, you’ll get much nicer anti-aliasing on your bitmaps, especially if you’re rotating or resizing them.

I also took the opportunity to resize the thumbnails to make them a bit larger and to tidy up the formatting of the older ones, which looks much better.

I just added Codeistry to Sortfolio, 37Signals portfolio hosting/aggregating thing for web developers. As usual for 37Signals stuff, Sortfolio is very slick, simple and easy to use. The only thing that I didn’t really like is the budget range – it doesn’t really fit my experience:

Codeistry jobs are significantly more variable than these categories allow; I could really do with a ‘$100 – $10,000′ category. I don’t really want to drive away interesting smaller clients by saying that I only care about jobs that are over $3000, but I also do $10,000 jobs occasionally too. Hmmm…

Anyway, I’ll be updating the Codeistry entry over the next few days, adding more examples and screenshots. I’ll assess things in a couple of weeks and let you know if it works – and if I actually get any leads and new business via Sortfolio.

I’ve also souped up the metadata that gets output in the page’s code, so that I’m now outputting a meta description tag – this outputs whatever I’ve typed into the page’s Description field in MODx.

I’ve also started using MODx built in meta keywords system, so some pages now have some keywords set.

A little while age I also added a Creative Commons license to the page footer but forget to mention it on the blog. This means that the site’s content is now actually marked as copright of Codeistry now – which it wasn’t before. As I’ve chosen a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, this also means that anyone can re-use, re-mix, translate or re-purpose any of the stuff on here for whatever they want, provided it’s non-commercial and they credit the original source.

Anyway, here’s the old footer:

and here’s the new one:

The changes are subtle but move the site from mostly failing to almost completely passing the contrast and luminosity tests from JucyStudio.

It might seem obvious but going through this process brought home to me how much the perceived contrast of text depends on the background colour behind it. Text that looks fine on the normal page background might have insufficient contrast when used in a footer, link or menu – where the background colours are different.

The changes included changing the body text to use the old heading colour, using a slightly darker colour for headings and links, and a slightly lighter shade for the page footers, to increase the contrast with the footer text.

I actually think that this has helped the design too – not only for accessibility but it also feels stronger, with more impact and weight. I may even revisit this in the future and punch it up a bit more.

Colour contrast testing tools

http://juicystudio.com/article/colour-contrast-analyser-firefox-extension.php

I wanted a contrasting font to go with Tahoma for use with body text – what you’re reading now. I wanted a font which would continue the theme of contrast between the technical and the artistic set-up by the logotype, but couldn’t use Candara, as almost no-one has it installed, so they wouldn’t see it when viewing the website. Candara also inevitably looses some of its subtle curves and arty feel when you get down as small as 11 or 12 point.

I also wanted to give an organic feel overall – I wanted the ‘artistic side’ to win out in the overall feel of the design.

I ended up using the font that you’re reading now, Georgia. This is another very nice font, very readable at body text sizes, with a large x-height and open letter forms. It’s also a serif font – which are generally felt to be more readable for longer passages of text. It contrasts nicely with the Tahoma headings and gives the page a very organic feel overall.