Welcome to the new Freeman lab site! This is the first of many posts about the science we do and the technology we develop. For now, I’ll just say a little bit about this site itself.
I built it using wintersmith, a fantastic static site generator built on node.js. We hope to use this blog to host a variety of content from our group members and our collaborators, so I wanted something to manage blog-style content written in markdown, without imposing too much structure, and while maintaining tons of flexibility. Wintersmith is just that, and has been a lot of fun to use.
The design itself is from scratch, but has a few sources of inspiration. The visualization on the front page uses D3 and was a little exercise I gave myself to extend Mike Bostock’s excellent path transition example to multiple lines. The primary color scheme is a modified version of the one we use in lightning. The fonts are Raleway, Cooperhewitt, and Roboto slab.
I owe Matt Conlen a thank you because he taught me pretty much everything I know about node.js, and thanks to the rest of my group for critiquing the design. Sorry Andrew and Davis, the lines are staying black. Nick, you win.