Just to let you know what we’ve been doing lately on Hard Format:
- We’ve got a new section called The Collections where people can display themed collections. Our first one of Jamaican 70s designs is courtesy of Dave Hendley. If you’ve an idea for one please get in touch!
- We’re gradually building up The designers section with pages on Peter Saville, Julian House and Hipnosis in preparation. We’ve been promised material from ECM (Dieter Rehm and Barbara Wojirsch), Vaughan Oliver, Non Format, Malcolm Garrett, Trevor Jackson and Jon Wozencroft. Ian Anderson from Designers Republic was initially enthusiastic, but he’s not replying any more :-(
- With today’s post (Susan Archie’s wonderful Charley Patton box) we’ve increased the image size a little from a width of 760 to 900 pixels and increased the gaps between the images, this hopefully shows off the designs better.
- It’s taken a long time, but I think our photography has improved a lot in recent months. We’re standardising around black backgrounds (except for very dark designs which are on grey) and we’re sorting out pesky barrel distortion in Photoshop to make the images look right. It’s been a real learning curve.
- At the top of each post there’s now a Next and Previous link so you can navigate through the site without having to return to the Contents page every time. Unfortunately my WordPress skills (or any coding at all in fact) aren’t great, so the link takes you to the next post in temporal order which may be a news item rather than the next weekly post. Hopefully it’s still useful though.
- Numerous smaller tweaks – we’ve tidied up the main navigation in the sidebar and the information box below the images should be more legible. Oh and at time of writing we’ve nearly sorted out how to split up the news section so it’s not one incredibly long page! Many thanks to Houndworld for his help with that.
That’s about it, but we’re always on the lookout for great new design or guest posts, so don’t hesitate to let us know if you see anything. Thanks for reading.