Some of the reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog might have noticed that the design has changed. When I orig­i­nally setup this blog, I of course chose one of the many ready-made themes avail­able for Word­Press. I set­tled on WP-Andreas01 and mod­i­fied it for a two-column lay­out, swapped out the header image, and adjusted the col­ors. It was clean, it was light, and it was min­i­mal­ist. Even­tu­ally I grew tired of it and wanted a dark theme, instead. I even­tu­ally set­tled on Never End­ing Dark­ness which again was clean and min­i­mal­ist. In the back of my mind, some­thing both­ered me even after I made the req­ui­site changes to the lay­out, col­ors, and graph­ics. I finally deter­mined that the design was cliché. So if I was to be happy with the design, it would have to be a design of my own mak­ing. This is a post-mortem analy­sis of that design.

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So yes­ter­day (Fri­day), my job and my part-time free­lance con­tract both ended at the same time. The pub­lisher I worked for finally suc­cumbed to the eco­nomic pres­sures of the credit freeze after hav­ing made a poor invest­ment. It’s sad too, because the com­pany was finally head­ing into the black after hav­ing a major dip in sales post-9/11. Unfor­tu­nately, the bank was threat­en­ing to call in the loan unless dras­tic mea­sures were taken to curb the spend­ing and to get some cash. So myself and another coworker were let go, and the com­pany will be liq­ui­dat­ing some assets.

Now, I’m just one among the many listed in those dis­mal unem­ploy­ment num­bers you hear dur­ing the evening news. Thank good­ness I got that part-time job to give me some cash to float on. Unfor­tu­nately, that means some of my planned pur­chases will be delayed. I’ll be spend­ing part of this week­end brush­ing up my resumé and read­ing about unem­ploy­ment claims.