You loved Pixar Portal before. But your love and admiration are about to leap to a whole new level. But really this is less about you, and more about me, because I don't want my hours of dedicated coding to go under-appreciated. So this post is meant to fill you in on all of the changes to the Pixar Portal website that I've been rolling out over the last couple of weeks.

Typography

First, to the delight of all of my fellow typophiles, I've made some big changes to the font choices on the site. The font I was using before had no built-in bold or italic styles. I make good use of those in my posts, which leaves your browser to fake bolds and italics by squashing and stretching the letterforms, which is ugly. So, I chose a new font called “Lato” which solves those problems and increases legibility.

Movie Pages

Second, the movie pages got a re-design. I liked how the old sliding windows simplified the initial look of the pages, but it was burying important content that visitors just weren't finding. As part of the convenience initiative, an iTunes widget now appears in the sidebar that makes it possible for you to hear soundtrack previews right from Pixar Portal, and links straight to get to the iTunes Store when you want to download them.

Widget

Pixar Portal now has an embeddable widget that you can add to your favorite dashboard so you can stay up on the news from your favorite first-login spot. And to you bloggers whose readers also have an interest in Pixar news, the widget plops perfectly into the sidebar of your blog.

Merida Header

In order to stay current, I added a Merida header image to the random rotation — a task I had been thoroughly dreading because I didn't want to deal with clipping out all her hair, but I bit the bullet and plowed through it. Click the image above to see it in all its hi-res glory.

Retina Ready

And finally, speaking of hi-res, the interface elements of Pixar Portal are now fully retina display compatible! Now anytime you visit the site on your retina-display-equipped iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro or other HiDPI devices, you'll be served up glorious, pixel dense images that make the interface more gorgeous than ever. Retina images are effectively four times the file size of their non-retina counterparts. For that reason, I have not yet settled on a strategy for the images in the blog posts and movie pages, so for now, those will remain at the lower resolution.

More to Come

I've got even more changes coming, many of which will be under-the-hood improvements to increase performance and speed. I'm also tinkering with some ideas for a complete interface re-design that will take Pixar Portal a far leap into the future . . . stay tuned.