Site Redesign: From Disposable Darling to Synesthesia Garden

If you used to follow DisposableDarling.com, you may have noticed that the blog has undergone a total makeover. The redesign had been brewing in my mind for months, and I and N. (the Webmaster) finally got down to it this past week or two.

Here’s a screencap of the old blog:

                                             Click for a larger view

I conceptualized/visualized the new design, down to the last detail (or rather, I imagined it pretty much all at once, in a complete image), and N. worked reeeallly hard to get everything right and the way I wanted it, as I’m really OCD and picky with details and was literally going, “Can you shift this two spaces to the right?” every five minutes.

I wanted to take the site in another aesthetic direction. I have about a million directions in me, but I settled on this one and had a vision of it inside my head that I would tweak and bring different parts of into focus at random times during the day. While Disposable Darling was white with red as the accompanying color, minimal, and rather precious-looking, I wanted the new one to be a little bit grungier, edgier, and more cluttered (a very orderly clutter). It’s basically a sort of visual negative of Disposable Darling – an inversion. The colors are black (the base color), white, and pink. Fonts are bigger, bolder, more graphic, and more integrated with the whole layout. Everything is enwrapped in boxes to satisfy my lust for visual order and integrity.

Instead of a baroque design with lots of flourishes and an old-timey vibe (which I love also), I opted for a starker, sleek, modern layout. But I always wanted a kind of elaborate crest in the header image, so we used a vector graphic from Chadlonius (he’s amazing) and modified it and added the twin hearts, which are vintage medical textbook illustrations. Those two hearts represent the idea of the “second heart,” which comes from a poem I really like that goes, “the second heart murmurs/its beatific perversions/to the first” (see poetry post below). That can mean a lot of things, obviously; but part of it, for me, is that my vision of the future incarnations of the blog would keep whispering to me and making my fingers itch, it wouldn’t let me rest. We are inspired to change by that restlessness.

{Another part of it is that I don’t think that we’re always guided by our most obvious motivations or goals, five-year plans or whatever; like, with me, all my actions can sort of be traced to an emotional origin that lies in a deeper, more buried, and more embedded sort of “second heart,” maybe, that lives alongside the first, or encloses the first within it. This has nothing to do with the subconscious or intuition, but everything to do with the primary, underlying motivations of our personalities and the broad themes that shape and describe our lives. And our complexity has to do with modernity; it’s as if we grow a second heart over time, as we evolve.}

Anyway, thanks to everyone who ever glanced at the blog and liked what they saw. And thanks especially to those 300 or so of you who’ve read it on at least a semi-regular basis. You guys are all wonderful! I hope you still enjoy it. I’m going to try to make things a little more organized from now on. I’m currently going through the 200+ posts I made on Disposable Darling and editing each one of them, which is a pain in the ass. God, I write poorly sometimes. A lot of them probably won’t be put up. I’m trying to be more disciplined – let’s see how long that lasts.

Goodbye, Disposable Darling.

Hello, Synesthesia Garden.

- L.