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Jeff Bridgforth
Jeff Bridgforth
Weeknotes

Weeknotes 26:41

I reworked the dark mode color scheme for a section of the Revive Our Hearts site to apply things I gained from an article I read two weeks ago. I enjoyed postseason baseball playing MLB The Show '23 with the Orioles.

Jeff Bridgforth
Jeff Bridgforth@jeffbridgforth.com
Oct 12, 20269 min read

Dark mode

mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had read Preethi Sam’s article, Embracing Dark Mode: A User’s Perspective on Accessibility. I wanted to take into account the perspectives that Preethi shared about using light mode and try to align a design with that perspective.

I decided to start with a recent project to update the dark color scheme with what I had learned from the article. I chose the True Woman ’27 conference microsite. I have been working on some updates for it recently so I thought it would make a good test case. My thinking is that I could try things on the microsite and then later think about making more global changes to the site.

I started by removing background color from different sections. I removed the background rules from the sections and put them into a media query for prefers-color-scheme: light. This allowed me to define the background-color for dark mode and not add any background color or gradients to the sections.

I updated the background color for the page in dark mode to #121212, which was one of the suggestions from the article.  That color was darker and gave more contrast than the prvious dark mode background color, #252525, which has a contrast of 15:32 with a white (#fff) foreground color. The new color (#121212) has a contrast of 18.73.

I elected to have borders as the visual cue for different sections. The light scheme uses different background colors as the visual cue. I had thought about using different shades of black, which the site already uses. But using the shades loses the high contrast so I opted for borders instead.

Former Dark Mode Updated Dark Mode

With all things accessibility related, I am sure that there are still some improvements that I could make. I try my best to take in perspectives from those like Preethi and make improvements that I hope make the experiences better for everyone.

Around the workshop

  • Study through the Bible email template – I worked on edits for the email template this week as I got feedback from our French and German teams. The edits were mostly translations, which included some graphics that I had to ask our design team to address.
  • I worked on the dark mode update to the True Woman ’27 pages on Monday and Tuesday.
  • One of my team members on the Portuguese team alerted me that several button colors had not updated on their site from my recent update for our new logo and color scheme. The reason those colors were not updated is that the color values are being pulled from the database. There is some flexibility to use other colors for different sections of the site. I started updating some of the pages manually but then realized a better solution would be to ask one of our backend developers to do a search and replace of the database.
  • I updated the logo in our backend of Django CMS. As I was working on that, I reached out to our design team to see if there was a guide with the color values of our new color schemes. I had used the color picker in Photoshop when I updated the colors last month. After getting a copy of the guide, I realigned several of the colors which was very easy to do since they were all using custom properties and only had to be updated once in the stylesheets.
  • I built a private page for ministry partners who attended a Vision Gathering weekend last week. The page started as a simple gallery of videos and later turned in a photo gallery and other links. I learned that we had a template that I could easily build the page within our CMS instead of creating a new template in our codebase.
  • The Wonder of the Word templates – I started editing the template for use on our other language sites. The other languages sites are participating in different levels in the Study through The Bible phase of The Wonder of the Word so I needed to add some conditionals to the templates to only show content where it was needed.

The Toasted Yolk

Before we left Johnson City on Sunday, we stopped to eat breakfast at The Toasted Yolk. My son has been doing graphic design work for the restaurant in his job at The Johnson Group. He worked on several different projects over the last four months. A lot of his recent work has been social media ads.

It was a lot of fun to be with him. He was really excited to visit the restaurant (part of a chain) and see some of his work displayed on a video monitor in the restaurant. And the food was really good. We started out with an appetizer of Churro donuts. And then each of us ordered something different from biscuits and gravy, an egg breakfast, pancakes, and hash brown casserole. We were really glad we could stop in before hitting the road. And it was a lot of fun for my son to experience his design work out in the wild.

Personal projects

  • I started working on a couple of articles. I listed the most influential books I have read. And I started working on a tribute to Jerry Bridges that I had wanted to write 10 years ago when he died. Jerry is one of my favorite authors. I am currently rereading his book, The Discipline of Grace, and meeting each week with a teammate to discuss a chapter.
  • I updated my Instagram archive that I created with Memento Mori. I copied the original output folder that included several of my CSS and HTML changes. I than ran the build script to get the new images and metadata. I determined which part of the HTML I needed to copy and paste in my updated version and copied over the new folders of thumbnails and media. It was that simple to update.
  • I spent a couple of hours on Saturday scanning pictures from the year we lived in eastern Hungary. I added the pictures to my memory keeper. I scanned pictures from late September to mid-October. I also listened to some music I had recorded from one of our worship times on campus. I got lost in Hungary for a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon.

Articles I read

Caught my eye

Destroy Any Website – I loaded up my own site and had fun destroying it on Friday. I will probably use it with the next site I have a bad UX experience with.

What I watched

Books I am reading

  • The Discipline of Grace (Jerry Bridges) – I read chapter on commitment and discussed with my teammate on Friday afternoon.
  • Enjoying Jesus (Tim Chester)
  • Desiring God (John Piper) – I read chapter 6 about prayer this week. My small group was unable to meet this week and we will discuss the chapter in two weeks.
  • The Heart Taken Up (Stephen Yuille)

Walking

  • Monday – 2.59 miles in 47 minutes – I took a late morning walk on Monday to clear my head. It was so nice outside with cooler temperatures.

What I played

MLB The Show 23 (Orioles) – I finished my season by coming from behind to win on Monday and then lost my last game on Tuesday. I started the playoffs on Wednesday. After a tight one in Game 1 (I won 2-1 on a walk off double), my offense came alive and I won the final two games of that series very easily. I advanced to the ALCS to play the Twins. I took a 1-0 lead into the 9th and brought in my closer hoping to wrap up a win. A couple of fielding mistakes led to 3 runs for the Twins and I was unable to answer in the bottom of the inning. It was disappointing to lose the game like that and fall behind 1-0 especially with that game being at home.

Adley Rutschman scoring the winning run in Game 1 of ALDS. Jorge Mateo doubled to left to score Adley. Jorge scored my only other run in the fifth. Kyle Tucker of the Astros hit a leadoff homer in all 3 games I played against the Astros.

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Jeff Bridgforth
Jeff Bridgforth@jeffbridgforth.com
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