I’m happy to announce that Amykow.com is back in action. Amy wanted to start with a clean slate so she could focus more on her art, so the older Blogger entries are now lost to the ages.

The site now runs on WordPress, with a template I specifically designed to act as gallery rather than weblog. This meant dispensing with comments and trackbacks (so as to avoid the travails of spam and community moderation) and moving most other conventional weblog trappings — date-based archives, categories, and search — down and out of the way, to draw focus to the current piece. Hence the bottom-positioned “side” bar.

Amy thought a black background would accentuate her work, and I agreed, having seen a similarly vivid sharpening effect in a book on Vermeer paintings which used glossy black pages. However, I still don’t think I’ve done enough for the design to visually center on the art; the text and link colors seem to compete too much with the painting, though for readability’s sake, the font cannot be made any smaller or darker. For now, I’m okay with this, and I’ll have a tweaked version of that theme up for other WordPress users desiring a similar layout.

(P.S. Note that I formulated this footer-oriented layout well before Powazek’s “Embrace Your Bottom.” In this case, it was the Flickr “Fruit at the Bottom” approach I had in mind.)