Blog Design, Part II
I’m going to try to justify and expand upon my comments last week concerning blog design and homogenization, carried over from the Blog Design post at Asterisk.
I’ll be quoting generously from the last few comments made in response to my last post, to aid comprehension in reading this lengthy entry and to help me structure my thoughts around it.
Robert Lofthouse said:
I don’t get the obsession with continually pushing design boundaries when the point of the web is content. Newspapers all follow the same layout, you can recognise a newspaper when you see one, but they all contain different content and the content is what people go to newspapers for.
We all seem to be reaching for metaphor to justify our design decisions, comparing blog design to shopfloor layout, architecture, newspapers – I would argue that while it is true that newspapers are instantly recognisable, it is far from accurate to state that they all follow the same layout. The BBC site has a useful comparison of newspaper front pages that shows the wide variety of layouts, type treatments and other aspects of design. You can browse other dates from that page – select a ‘big’ news day to see how the different publications handle their coverage of earth-shattering events.
Just because someone uses a blog layout doesn’t mean their design isn’t original and the content is boring.
Excuse me? Nowhere have I made the association between dull design and boring content.
Matthew: Correct me if i’m wrong, but isn’t your web site in standard blog format? It’s a bit strange having someone preaching at people for using a standard blog format, when the preacher is using the same format. Maybe you should consider trying to back yourself up by bringing out a revolutionary layout? You say on you’re blog that the reason you use a standard fixed width template is because you’re not an “uber designer”. What’s being a good designer got to do with constructing a different layout that’s elasticated? Not having a go at you, I just don’t understand your excuse.
To expand a little on my ‘excuse’ – I have lots of ideas for what I want to accomplish with this site, but at the moment I lack the time to put them into practice. However, I wanted to start creating content, and the default install layout wasn’t really helping my creative juices. So, I knocked up a simple “standard blog format” layout, simply to prevent myself getting depressed every time I visited the site.
I realise that this doesn’t exactly help my argument; rest assured, when I have the time (and a computer that works – my laptop died over the weekend) I will be putting my words into action.
You also seem to have slightly misinterpreted one aspect of what I was saying – I’m not evangelising elastic/liquid layouts; merely saying that I believe that we risk inculcating a mindset that the ‘standard’ blog layout is “the best” by default, and thus excuse ourselves from attempting to explore new design avenues.
Andrei Herasimchuk said in response to my criticism of his re-redesign:
You might be reading far too much into redesigns, at least my own. Quite simply, I was having a hell of a time getting Internet Explorer on Windows to play nice with the things I wantd to do to make the elastic design I was attempting work. I was seeing all sorts of gaps, font-size values were inconsistent making it hard to line-up visual elements, etc. In doing so, I was spending all my free time fiddling with code all day rather than writing or designing.
After three weeks, I got really bored trying to figure out CSS hacks or ways to make IE play nice. So I threw in the towel to fight that fight another day. (And yes, I will fight it another day, just not today.)
I have a huge amount of respect for Andrei – I think he is one of the most compelling bloggers around (and a writer of great screenplays too!); and of course I appreciate the pressures of time, work and other commitments on what is essentially a labour of love. The point I was trying to make was that here we have an immensely talented designer who strikes out on the road less travelled, making a bold break with tradition to explore new boundaries – and then a couple of weeks later admits defeat and reverts to the safe, established layout we all know and… live with.
...I hardly think the DxF v3 is a step back. I think that’s being overly harsh. To me, the header plus the pieces above the fold have a nice simplistic elegance to them. I was attempting to do more with less. That’s just my opinion. Further, I didn’t create the design thinking it was “best practices.” It just worked well enough for my purposes so I did it. There is no conspiracy.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the site. It’s a great design, but as I said above, what could it have been?
I’m conscious that I’m in danger of straying into territory that Scrivs has covered recently – demanding that these strangers on the internet live up to my ideals, feeling that somehow I have a say in what they do with their own sites in their own time. I hope Andrei takes this in the sense in which it was intended.
Finally, Keith said:
Matthew – I understand your point of view, but I think it might be a bit misguided. Let me put it this way–compare Web design to architecture, ok? Now obviously when you are designing a building or house there is a whole lot of room for interpretation, right? But in general most houses look the same. They all have a bathroom, a kitchen, etc. You’d not radically change the way a house is designed just because you want to innovate. I know it’s not really a relevant example, but a house is a house, is a house, and it’s that way for a reason.
And are the bathroom and kitchen in your house in the same place as they are in my house?
In architecture, a field much older than Web design, along the way guidelines became rules and at the end of the day a successful house is one you can live in. It’s not the physical form that’s the most important…it’s the detials.
Not really – if it were simply the details, everything but the taps (faucets) and the curtains would be the same. It’s the building blocks that remain constant – bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms – but how they are arranged differs from country to country, street to street, and house to house.
Similarly with blog design, the building blocks are all present and correct – branding, navigation, content, links, copyright – but why should we feel constrained in their layout by some vague notion of usability?
...if you want to provide a quality design that’s proven to work and place the focus on the content… the “patented SimpleBits-esque layout” might be a good place to start.
It might be – but then again, it might not. The situation we should seek to avoid is one where “we hold these truths to be self-evident –to place the focus on the content, the best layout to use is…”
Don’t start from SimpleBits – start from a blank piece of paper.
The old Gene Fowler quote comes to mind, with perhaps a little amendment –
Blog design is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until your forehead bleeds.
;)
UPDATE: Yet another post about blog design
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