There has, of late, been talk in the webdesign community about moving away from static templates and embracing individual, art-directed pages. Khoi Vinh tried it with A Brief Message and Jason Santa Maria is currently experimenting along the same lines on his blog. Neither effort is particularly effective thus far, lacking both the beauty of great design and the immediacy of great blogs.
In both cases it is a problem of overheads and maintenance: it takes time and energy to design something interesting on a regular basis. In my experience, when bloggers start thinking too hard they tend to stop writing. You may say that you could publish less and work on the quality, but that is anathema to the conversational nature of blogging.
I myself have been thinking in a vague, procrastinatory way about expanding the remit of this website. The main thing is to keep writing on a daily basis in the vain hope of becoming a more accomplished prose stylist, but perhaps the site can be improved and expanded without losing focus. Vinh’s Subtraction remains the gold standard for including lots of interesting information in a simple, unobtrusive, aesthetically beautiful way.
Other ones I like include:
Squawk Design, which has a well-integrated design portfolio. My only problem with that is that I can never think of very much to say about the designs in my portfolio.
Raduceuca, which is nice and colourful and includes all the things that used to be on this site: twitter, delicious sidelinks, flickr photos. Frankly, I am bored of social networks in general and don’t particularly want to pollute my site with other people’s twitty apps.
Equivocality. Of course, I could try and integrate my photography in a more regular way, as I did with my very enjoyable photojournal, but alas I don’t have enough to time to maintain one.
No, less is still more. If I am going to make any changes it will be to improve access to the archives and make it easier embellish the posts. If you, dear reader, have any suggestions please leave them below!
“Khoi Vinh tried it with A Brief Message and Jason Santa Maria is currently experimenting along the same lines on his blog. Neither effort is particularly effective thus far, lacking both the beauty of great design and the immediacy of great blogs.”
Thanks for the comments! I’m actually not writing any more or less than I used to (though I am gunning to write a bit more). Time hasn’t played a significant factor yet though. I’m just one guy, and my experiment is certainly not quantity of posts, but testing the quality I can produce within time constraints. I would even argue that the aesthetics of what I’m doing are secondary. The main goal (for me, at least) is the action of it; testing my theories of a reasonable process and system for exercising more creative control over the stories I’m telling.
Great design isn’t beauty alone. Sometimes what I do may result in a pleasing outcome, other times, not so much. I’m fine with that either way. But by testing this out on myself and my site, I can hopefully open the door to more rich experiences in the work I do.
Thanks for stopping by, Stan. I look forward to seeing your experiments — which will doubtless be interesting — I just think that an art directed blog is an oxymoron. I hope to be proved wrong.
“I just think that an art directed blog is an oxymoron. I hope to be proved wrong.”
Well, my hope is that the end result is a bit more than blogs. Much of the client work I do deals with editorial content, periodicals, etc. Like I said, since I’m one guy, my blog is the perfect testbed for me to try out some stuff. But that definitely doesn’t mean I think all blogs need to be art directed. This is also for the purpose of informing other work.
You’re very much a writer’s writer though Neil. What Jason’s doing only works because he has a designer’s design ethic and oftentimes that’s what he’s talking about, in a pretty post-modernist way. I would say the same for a Brief Message but to be honest the good articles are far and few between.
For the rest of your faves, I honestly think there’s little happy bargain. I just don’t get Vinh at all — he tends to talk in a pretty magnanimous way about grids and the sacrosanct universality of common symbols and gives us a blog with the worst vertical rhythm in web history and chucks meaningless ‘+’ glyphs all over the place. His previous design had a really nice layout, but that’s as far as it goes. What does it do for you?
I don’t know if vertical rhythm is all that important in web design, if you mean correct line heights and all that. What is important and what I think Vinh achieves, is hierarchy of content.