Dreams of the Quill

This might be the most accessible version of Dreams of the Quill ever! With DotQ v5, I’ve overcome the font hurdles that were bringing the site down the last couple years. Things should look roughly the same, font-wise, in any modern browser on any computer. Hopefully this means that the header navigation won’t spill out of the white area. And some other good things.

This site has been tested and found to be working in the following browsers:

Firefox 3 Mac
Safari 2 Mac
Safari 3.1 Mac
Opera 9.5 Mac
Camino 1.6 Mac
Sunrise 1.7 Mac

If you use a different browser, or a different operating system, please let me know if the site works! This is what it should look like.

Browser Recommendations

I can’t recommend any single browser. DotQ looks fine in everything I’ve tested (there’s a one-pixel anomaly for one element in Opera 9.5), and many browsers have their strengths and weaknesses. I use three to four on a daily basis myself, so I can’t recommend one! My personal favorite is Camino—but it’s far from being multipurpose enough for most users, as it’s essentially a prettier, faster, stripped-down Firefox for the Mac.

Visit this site in whatever you use… and if that doesn’t work so well, check out any of the browsers listed above.

Design Choices

Fonts – with previous versions of DotQ, everything was Times New Roman. I’m a huge fan of Times New Roman. Made my site look like my English homework. Problem here is that, according to people who know, Times New Roman is terrible for reading on a screen. So I turned to Arial as my main font for v5. I don’t think it’s particularly pretty, but it’s a screen standard and it’s easily readable by most.

Width – DotQ is now 800 pixels wide. It used to be 800 pixels wide. Then I made it wider—about 940 pixels or so. Talk about a disaster! It didn’t look good on small screens and it didn’t look particularly good on large screens. I brought it back to 800 pixels because I wanted the site to be more accessible to people who don’t browse in full screen on 1440×900 (or larger) resolutions. My reasoning here is two-fold:

• First, if you’re on a large screen you can decrease your browser window size. If you’re on a small screen, you can’t. It’s generally better to make things better by default for the camp without options.
• Second, say you’re browsing with a 1400-pixel-wide browser window. DotQ’s main text column is now approximately 1200 pixels wide. Your eyes are darting back and forth a lot in order to read those long, long horizontal lines of text. So you shouldn’t be browsing with that width anyway!

You can always shrink your browser window if you find that DotQ’s too small and lonely in a big sea of green. Alternatively, you can just hit ctrl+ a few times until it fills your window.

Colors – “Green and white is easy on the eyes.” I don’t know about this famous quote of KCG’s (he was being sarcastic, I think), but DotQ has been green and white since v2. Well, green and light gray. All “white” backgrounds on DotQ are #fafafa, which is almost-but-not-quite white. All “black” text on DotQ is #333, which is the opposite. Not-quite-white and not-quite-black combine to make text that is not as painful to read as black on white, in my experience. As for the green… it’s my favorite color :3

Thank you.
—Flak, admin of DotQ

Layout History

1. Proboards – white on blue
2. Bravehost – orange on gray on white
3. Hostmatrix – orange on gray on white
4. Hostmatrix – Wordpress with “Default” theme
5. Hostmatrix – Wordpress with customized “Pool” theme (v1, ’service da’)
6. Hostmatrix – green and white, 100% custom code (v2, ‘Last Breath’)
7. Hostmatrix – green and white, Wordpress with custom theme (v3, ‘Not Dead Yet’)
8. Hostmatrix – pink and white, Wordpress with custom theme (v3lol, ‘April Fools’)
9. Godaddy – green and white, Wordpress with custom theme (v4, ‘Puppet’)
10. Godaddy – blue, white, and black, Wordpress with custom theme (v1r, ’service da’)
11. Godaddy – green and white, Wordpress with 100% custom theme (v2r, ‘Last Breath’)
12. Godaddy – green and white, Wordpress with 100% custom theme (v2r+, ‘Last Breath’)
13. Godaddy – green and white, Wordpress with 100% custom theme (v2r+, ‘Last Breath’)
14. Godaddy – green and white, Wordpress with 100% custom theme (v5, ‘Walking Slowly’)