Writer and curator of biberfan.org John Hendron is an avid enthusiast for creative pursuits and old music. A graduate of the University of Rochester where he studied trombone and music composition at the Eastman School, John today focuses upon writing about technology, education, and pursuits in gastronomy.

Visual Design

For the 2008 re-design of biberfan.org, I went after a clean aesthetic, but I couldn’t just go white. Instead, I took my camera and captured the texture of objects around the house: walls, cabinetry, and more. I ultimately chose a gray-blue color as a backdrop with the luminosity grabbed from an image of one of these textures. Ultimately, I like the contrast of text against a light treatment of textures.

The way I constructed the CSS for this theme, I can insert/extract different textures at will, by replacing one large JPEG file. The other components used are transparent 24-bit PNG files (sorry IE folks on PCs, versions 5/6). These allow me to overlay anything when I change my mind on the backdrops.

What about branding and the “lack” of design? After many years of playing with different graphical elements, I decided the one thing that was consistent was my writing and that is, after all, the most important thing at the website. The “design” is meant to emphasize this: the content I write is put up, front and left-aligned. Permalinks are set to the date of publication. Other metadata-esque things like comment links are again out of the way.

The previous incarnation of this website used a modified version of the Hemingway theme built for Wordpress. This time around, I developed my own Wordpress theme. It kept me in good coding practice.

The other visual elements important to this theme are single-bordered images, and the left/right columns that are echoed in each major section of the site.

Fonts

I am dismayed that dealing with fonts online is such a pain. For this re-design, I’ve used Helvetica Neue for the headings and Liberation Serif (or Times) for the main copy. I know, embedded fonts are now supported by Safari on Mac, but licensing restricts us from using the top-shelf fonts we might use in a Photoshopped-image.

The biberfan “logo” has been rendered since the late 1990s in DIN Middleschrift.

Tools

For this website, I use MarsEdit to post blog entires, Flickr to house photographs, Photoshop to treat graphics, and BBEdit to code the XHTML/CSS. This website is powered by Wordpress 2.

Color

The original design (2008) for this website focused on the following four colors:

History

I always feel compelled to write a short history about this site. In ‘net terms, it might be considered “old.” This site was born in May, 1998 as biberfan.com, site I named after my handle, which was in use since my college years. I’m a fan of the music of Heinrich Iganz Franz von Biber (1644-1704), a virtuoso composer of violin music. The site started with stories, ideas, and general ramblings about photography, and more importantly, music. Other friends of the day contributed stories and essays.

The site soon thereafter took on the form of a weblog. It has existed in several incarnations as a blog powered by Blogger, Movable Type, and finally, Wordpress. Several years ago, I abandoned the .com designation with a move of the site from one platform and host, to another, and the site became biberfan.org.

It was also around the time of late 2006 when I split biberfan.org into three separate websites. I had often written about personal antidotes, music, and food in one maligned space. After this experiment, I still maintain the food/restaurant review blog elsewhere, but have decided with the new year (2008) to not let biberfan die. Instead of writing only about music, I have decided to include more “banter” to continue my need for an outlet for creative thought online.

I also have started a professional website dedicated to my vocation focused on education and technology.

Summary

biberfan.org is the personal/music-related weblog of John Hendron, a resident of Richmond, Virginia (USA) powered by Wordpress. The site design was created by Hendron using a variety of software applications on the Apple Macintosh platform. The design and content of this site has evolved for almost 10 years and is protected by copyright. I’m not evil: if you want to re-use something you find on this site, just ask.

For more information about the author, visit my ‘About’ page.