Jason Santa Maria rethinks his website

Who would launch the tenth anniversary redesign of their website on a Friday afternoon? Well, probably only Jason Santa Maria. His twitter bio sums up his unfortunate predicament: “Designer by day, designer by night.”

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Jason has positioned himself as the godfather of modern typographic resources – here are a few of the offices he currently holds:

  • Co-founder of Typedia, which as the name suggests is an online encyclopedia of typefaces
  • Creative director for Typekit, a subscription-based service offering hosted web fonts
  • Lecturer for the Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC
  • Creative director for the online web magazine A List Apart
  • Co-founder/designer of ALA’s publishing wing A Book Apart

The other projects and events he is involved in are innumerable, so instead of trying to figure out whether Jason has a clone army or just never sleeps, go over and take a look at the latest incarnation of jasonsantamaria.com.

The previous version of his website/blog introduced the concept of a custom design for each article as opposed to having entries conform to a rigid template, but this posed an unforeseen problem:

In order to post something, I felt it couldn’t be short or just a quip on a topic, it had to be substantial. I fell into a design trap I unknowingly set for myself. – Jason Santa Maria

Here’s a screenshot of the new home page design which allows posts of various lengths to co-exist in one stream. It features one of my favourite fonts Chaparral for most of the text:

Jason Santa Maria website redesign

Personally I don’t think he is breaking new ground with this less-is-more offering, but when Jason Santa Maria redesigns it is always worth sitting up, taking a good hard look and perhaps even a leaf or two from his book…

By Typedeck

Typedeck started out as a collection of hand-picked creative news, resources and inspiration on the night of 5 June 2011.

2 comments

  1. I like the vibrancy I sense, but one sense overrides: close to home – really close – i am acquainted with a graphic designer who could/should/must/will step out and become more visible; AS visible; engageable; commissionable. Why? Because he CAN!!!

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