My recent design refresh is already bearing fruit around these parts. Behold the new photo album template, which you can see in the Ireland photos, some recent Paris photos, photos from the High Line, etc. The album pages are the first non-white background pages to make it onto kottke.org in quite awhile, which was part of the reason for the design refresh. I tried the photos on white, but I felt they looked better on a darker background, so I went with that. The photos are also larger than they previously were, up from 600 pixels wide to 720 pixels. The file sizes are also quite large (sorry!)...BetterHTMLExport doesn't do the best job in compressing jpgs while preserving image quality. Photoshop's "Save for Web" does a much better job, but that would be a lot more time consuming for me. The search for the perfect solution goes on...
But my favorite part of the albums are the navigation. If you mouseover the right half of the photo, you get an arrow overlaid on the photo that suggests that you can click to move to the next photo (which, of course, you can). Then you can click on the left side of the photo to go back. If you're using Safari or Firefox or anything but IE really, the arrow images are tranparent png files that blend in with the photo in the background. Fun!
Up next: the photo page needs some help.