I really want to make this site look less like Whalesalad. I don’t know quite where the division between stealing and being inspired comes. I think my site is well over that division, since it’s a completely different feel and everything, but I was heavily inspired. The most heavily inspired site of mine was Tentmaker Publications, which, you may notice, looks a little bit like Blogger, the design of which I criticized back in the day, but can’t find the post.

However, those things helped me to learn, and I changed the look quite significantly on both. I’ll be trying to be more original in future.

This site was also inspired (in a good way) by all those Ruby on Rails preview sites, you’ll notice it most in my posting style. The patterned background was inspired by how Challies Dot Com used to be

I haven’t been able to stop using those shadows at the sides of my designs since I made Tentmaker though. Please note this site, Tentmaker Publications, china.adversaria, and my latest project. What do they have in common? …Apart from them mostly having 750px wide content sections of course…