I've been wanting to redesign my website for some time. The turn-key 11ty "starter blog" I was using before was probably perfectly editable, but who wants to try and understand someone else's mistakes when you can start from scratch and make all of your own mistakes! At the same time, ever since I stopped streaming[1] (which was fun in its own right but was mainly to support podcasting) I've been missing the design-y aspect of streamer layouts. Two great problems that go great together right? I can redesign my website to resemble my old streamer layout! haha nope! Well, sorta. My streamer layout went through several iterations, and the one I liked the most was the speedrun layout: game on the left, camera and splits on the right. All of the colors are from the Nostalgia Goggles palette, a bold drop shadow, and the background image from the game I was running[2]. I started laying out boxes to put posts and navigation into, and I made it all the way through learning some basics of modern flex n' grid CSS before adding my favorite touch; the game's map as the background. Except therein, as the bard would say, lies the rub. Streamer layouts have to fit inside a 16:9 video player. You can use as much or as little of that space as you want, but you know the shape of your container and there is no responsive reflow or breaking out of the box. That means my beloved pixel art maps could be artfully cropped and they'd stay right where I put them[3]. Websites are not so predictable. As you can see from the website you're reading this on, or the screenshot above (if you're reading this in RSS or in a future where I've changed the desgin again) I did not "solve" that "problem". There are options I know of but they all come with trade-offs I don't like: use a large enough image that most posts won't reach the edges but will be difficult to position. tile the background and accept seams which are likely to be ugly. use an image I like and accept it will almost always show edges because the viewing ratio is flipped. scale the image to fill the viewport which will crop weirdly on long pages. For now it's --ng-light-blue all the way. It's a good color[4], and most importantly I'm happy to have a design I own. Strongbad voice still my favorite channel reward. ↩︎ I'm saying this like I ever ran more than two different games. ↩︎ One of my early layouts had the whole overlay in actual 1:1 pixels and then I just scaled it in OBS. It was incredibly efficient in a system where that efficiency was immediately drowned out by having to render a single frame of video. C'est la vie. ↩︎ Brent, ↩︎