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a palette similar

Attentive readers may notice that I’ve recently added a Creative Commons licensing badge to nicomachus.net. I’ve meant to add it for some time now, and older versions of nicomachus.net bore the badge. In the process of switching to WordPress (in 2007) and revamping the (visual) theme for the site, I lost or decided to shed most of the blog links and other sidebar items I had collected. So after a two-year hiatus, it’s now back.

from wallyg's Flickr photostream

You’ll notice too that I’ve recently updated the look of this site, which I hope is both pleasing to the eye and quick-loading on your computers. One feature that I want to draw your attention to is the navigation system in the top left corner of the screen, which is a story in itself.

Color by COLOURlovers

The vertical bars, which switch to black when you hover your cursor over them, are meant to mimic the fluted columns of doric and ionic architecture (e.g. the inset grooves of the columns supporting the Parthenon in ancient Greece). I don’t really expect anyone to pick up on this bit of visual rhyming, but it represents part of the style I am developing on both this website and, more specifically, on my business’ website. You see, as a perpetual student of ancient Greek philosophy, I look for ways to incorporate and exhibit some of the virtues of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus’ ethics and aesthetics. After all, one of the most important things one can do with one’s life is to develop a sense of style that ultimately guides all of one’s decisions and behavior.

For the palette, I knew I wanted to use a spectrum of shades of red. I found inspiration on the bedside table.

The concept for the vertical bars fits most squarely into my other website, the one for my web-design and digital media company, nicomedia. I decided to use the vertical bar concept, although mirrored, on this website as well in order to imply the connection between the ethic of my business and and ethic of my personal site — both sites, just as both the commercial and civic motivations in my life, are inspired and led by the same background.

header for nicomedia's website

in the footer at Ogilvy Durham

So, if it’s not obvious from all that I’ve said here, I put some thought into this design. A moment of panic, then, was understandable last week, when I noticed that another local website design company is making use of a similar navigation system. Ogilvy Durham’s blog site lists their most often employed tags in shades of red not unlike the pile-of-books palette.

While it struck me at first as a strange coincidence that two website design firms in Durham would develop and employ a navigation system so visually and behaviorally similar, after an email exchange with the Senior Art Director at Ogilvy, it’s clear that we simply share both an affinity for red and black (OgilvyDurham because red and black are Ogilvy colors generally, nicomachus.net because of the political symbolism behind the colors) as well as a design intuition.

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