When listening to Boagworld's podcast some weeks ago I heard about the Fancy Form Design book from SitePoint. Since Paul Boag recommended it I thought, well, give it a try. And yes, I think it's a nice book, indeed. I like it because it gives the reader new ideas on how to design and implement modern forms.

So being inspired after reading the book I looked at my own "Your comment" form and thought: "OMG! WTF?" I have to admit I never really spent much time on designing and implementing the form. But after reading the book I though it was about time to give my comment form a little bit of love. During the process of revamping the form I also digged deeper into the world of jQuery which is a good thing imho. I even wrote my first little plugin that handles an example value on form fields like this:

$("#id_author").fancyField({sampleValue: "Joe Cool"});

It will automatically setup everything like registering for focus() and blur() and even registering on the enclosing form tag for the submit event. Anyway, have a look at the form for yourself to get the idea :)

Though I was quite confident with my newest design there's always room for improvement. So I sat down once more, started my GFX app and played around. The new design tries to visually divide the areas on my page a bit more, like the side panel for the tag cloud. Though I think there's still more room for refinements left it's still worth to implement the revamped design. I mean, at the end of the day there will be always things to work on. That's the very nature of software, isn't it?

Seit geraumer Zeit geistern mir schon diverse Ideen für ein neues Design durch den Kopf. Letzte Nacht vor dem Einschlafen hatte ich nun ganz spontan ein recht klares Bild vor meinem geistigen Auge. Also habe ich mich heute an Photoshop gesetzt und versucht, diese Idee umzusetzen. Dabei kam folgender grober Entwurf heraus:

!/photos/8_Design-2006-08-08.png!

Bis zur Endversion ist es aber noch ein weiter Weg =)