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otherwise it's all good.
At least, please remove this font which was made for paper, and use arial or verdana which are appropriate for screens. :)
I happen to be pretty into John Gruber's Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/.
Also: this courier is ridiculous.
As a commercial designer/director, I believe that all good design has a purpose. In your particular case, Design exists to package and enhance the accessibility of your content. If in fact a minimal approach achieves this for your users, then that is the definition of good design.
I would highly recommend a minimal approach. Too much Social Media design is over-glossed. Everything looks like it's inside a glass container (the aqua effect) that is hovering over water (the reflection effect). These are design fads, not design trends, and in 3 years (or less) from now, they'll be mocked.
Let me know if you want a great minimalist Wordpress template. I would be happy to help.
Looking forward to see what you come up with on a new design!
The web doesn't like fluid impagination. Don't trus useit.com.
Any theme that distracts from content with curlicues, shiny surfaces, colors, etc. has failed at perhaps the highest aim of site design, which is to clearly communicate the content of the site, and provide obvious and well-structured navigation to additional content.
A theme needn't be "plain" to be effective and clear any more than having a beautifully designed site automatically makes it less-usable (see, for example, the marriage of form & function in Apple gadgets, to cite a perfectly cliché example).
Your site, to be specific, could benefit from a fixed width. It'd increase readability without at all becoming less "plain." And alternative methods for navigating the archive might also be more usable.
But your overall point is very well taken, and I think more folks should consider the design of their sites from the inside out, adding "decoration" only as necessary to communicate something integral to the audience.
It's quite interesting to hear that traffic as not affected at all. I've always considered people to be quite finicky when it comes to design and thought it impacted their stay.
Was the length of stay per article unchanged as well when compared against previously published articles of similar content/length?
I like the idea of putting more focus on the content. I feel overwhelmed sometimes with so much crud on sites like Mashable. Looking forward to seeing how you address and balance this with you upcoming redesign.
So yes, it's usable and traffic hasn't dropped but I think over time you'd find growth impacted by it.
That being said, there is a difference between a site design that adds to the experience and one that looks more like a pre-teen's Myspace page. (not that yours did)
For a lesser-known person or someone starting out, they need to have as many things NOT get in the way of a click off the site as possible ... and a nice design is one of those "don't go away 'cause I'm ugly" easy fixes.
(Says David, who paid for Thesis :-)
What ever you do - just don't over design it. Take what you have here, and add just enough to make it readable/scanable. Play with the hierarchy in the type and leave it alone.
Identity really provides credibility to new readers, and assurance to old readers that you still have your wits about you.
By default, IE is set to Times New Roman, which as many people have pointed out, is not an optimal font for on-screen reading.
Try changing your default browser font to your favorite font and see what happens. :)
All these fancy new web2-y UIs are a major distraction from the task at hand. And they are very expensive to build, maintain and modify.
Well, maybe not with WordPress. I don't know. But "Ugly" and "Clean" do not go together.
Google and Craigslist are generally praised for minimalist clean designs, they sitll have some designers who work on making it actually decent to look at.
Frnakly it doens't matter to me though, your blog is in Google Reader as far as I am concerned.
I'm quite certain you will not leave your site this way in the long run so I'm not to worried about it, however as some have kind of mentioned above, you can have minimalistic and still have good design. Right now you just have minimalistc and not good design.
Gmail is minimalistic and has good design (for the most part), google.com is minimalistic but poor design, Live.com is minimalistic and good design. Craigslist.com is minimalistic with poor design, ilist.com is minimalistic and has good design.
So clearly poor design drives traffic :)
I hope you will keep a minimalistic design, I think there is lots to be said for a clean easy to use clutter free interface, Chris Pirillo's blog simply has to much noise on it, to many things trying to load and get my attention. It almost always brings my browser to a halt. I simply stopped going there because it got to frustrating.
I also hope you bring in some good design to the minimalistic format you will have something really nice to read, pleasant to look at and keeps the noise level down to a minimum.
All the other places you are at (twitter, friend feed) are noisy when it comes to you (as a follower) it's hard to sort things out and really get your opinion on topics because they fly by a mile a minute. (almost literally).
That is why I like your blog (and most blogs) because it takes time to write a post, you have to actually give some real thought as to what you are saying and typically its a topic that you feel strongly about which is always a good read.
Cheers,
zebb
Actually, the most important suggestion I have is to modify the h1 in your CSS to be black, not underlined.
I'm not a designer, but Google.com's design is nearly perfect, simply because it does not distract users from their purpose for using the site. Ilist? Four columns of text on a page turns into a gray blur. Maybe Ilist's design is "good", but it defeats the purpose of going to the site.
As for this site, I read it occasionally, and only for the content. I like an attractive, yet functional site, but if the content isn't there, I won't be back.
------
How do you want others to perceive you - as plain jane as this theme - I mean those that haven't followed you for years through all the various changes?
As far as ilist.com vs. craigslist.com, craigslist has 7 main columns and some of those columns are split up into additional columns, plus there is a white background between a majority of the links which in return causes a set of grey grid lines between each item which causes un-necessary noise on the page. Most people also don't need to see a 100 different locations either, so why include them? Again it's un-necessary clutter and noies.
Where as on ilist.com you can quickly and easily search for something (which is what the world does these days) or you can easily browse listings similar to craigslist. Ilist ONLY has 4 columns which are far easier to read, have better line-height, uses slightly larger font(I think), and doesn't show hordes of other locations that will never be looked at.
I agree on only reading this site for content, I agree he should keep all his other noise machines off his blog and leave them where they are at.
It all depends what you want to tell your clients about yourself through your visual presentation.
To be blunt, your type and minimalist look now is hideous. It makes me think of university White Paper work that is posted by professors and other large-brained creatures that are only trying to disseminate content. Their audiences tend to be small and are only concerned with their work.
What you're completely ignoring in your decision to go "naked", so to speak, is the first impressions of NEW readers.
Right now, you seem to have a loyal following. You can do all sorts of crazy things and they know how good you are and the quality of your content. How your looks does not matter to 90% of them. So, their opinion carries weight, but should be less important in the larger picture.
No business, writer, blogger can survive the long haul without constantly cultivating new customers, or in your case - readers.
Your design is your store front. Everyone is stimulated differently. For new window shoppers, in my opinion, your present look is TOO minimal, and actually a repellent. You are potentially turning off new readers - specifically those that tend to take in the blog as a whole, rather than focusing strictly on content.
Your content is fabulous. Your style is personable. I never saw your designed blog. I don't know how radical this look is from the previous look.
I used to tell my clients a simple story. I called it the "Mustard On Your Shirt" story. Once you develop friends (aka people that love and accept your brand), you can show up for work with mustard on your shirt and no one will care. But if you were being reviewed by a new critical eye, a big yellow spot on your wrinkled white shirt may have a very negative impact on the viability of the new relationship.
A case study I should write a dissertation on was a barbecue client in Las Vegas. Mike Mills is the only three time World Grand Champion winner of the Memphis in May Cook-Off. He's the Elvis of Barbecue.
He's got a little joint in southern Illinois. When established a second location under a different identity Memphis Championship Barbecue in Vegas, he did things the way he did in the tiny Illinois town - cheap and cheesy.
The food survived his lack of style in a small venue. But they wanted to expand. I worked with them when they built their flagship store near McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. We looked at ever single thing a customer could see or touch. How can we make it our own? We tweaked everything.
Several years later the Vegas chain had grown to four locations. Yet every single customer thought they were a national chain.
PERCEPTION IS REALITY. It's not what it is or what YOU think it is... it all matters what the viewer/customer/client THINKS it is.
You have to strike an appropriate compromise between your present 100% content - 0% style and the rubbish on MySpace (aka The Modern Digital Museum of Visual Atrocities).
From your post, you said you eliminated all the branding stuff. Sorry, buddy... that's like saying, I left my iPod at home and my Soul.
No, your brand is EVERYTHING YOU DO. It is NOT a thing, it is more a composite impression. Right now, your brand says, "I don't give a rat's ass about visual appeal." Brand is not a commodity you shuffle around. A brand is every thought your readers and potential readers have about you titrated down to a positive, negative or neutral response.
Right now, your brand looks to me like something out of academia that is only concerned with content. Which is a lousy marketing strategy, unless you're trying to reduce readership and conserve global bandwith usage.
You don't need to add curtains, Persian rugs, flashing lights and gizmos... but you should have something visually that hints or suggests you talk tech. A light silicon chip graphic behind your title would be all you need. (And resize it to proportion. I vomit every time I see these office boobs with MS Word stretching clip art like it's taffy or a carnival mirror.)
Also, without traditional blog formating, text runs all the way across the screen. I have a large monitor with a browser that occupies about 2/3 of the surface area. I find myself moving my head to read your posts, in present form. Books are designed to be a certain size for a reason. The human eye works well within a justified or left-aligned frame three to five inches wide, depending on type size. A magazine may have cover dimensions of 20" x 20" - but content is still formated in columns.
Comment #15 by RobOswald validates everything I've written.
Get a form, better choice of type, and a picture of something techie... could be as simple as a cable. Don't go nuts, just don't be nuts. Right now, at a glance, I have no idea what you are about, observing visually. A shame because your content is exceptional.
Grade: Content A++, Brand D, Visual Appeal to new visitors F-
For new blogs that just start up, the design is more important. You need to attract people to your blog and having a bad or no design will keep them away from visiting your blog frequently or even signing up to the RSS.
It is like in "real" life - if you meet a person first time, you check (maybe subconciously) if she/he is attractive to you before you will even start speaking to her/him and get to know the personality.
About your un-designing I guess it was a great attempt to show that popular blogs can really do it without all the design hype and your approach will severely scare all the theme sellers ripping the bloggers off with crappy themes. Nevertheless, my opinion is that you are maybe a bit too radical. Clean design is a good idea but no design isn´t. There are very nice and clean designs out there, maybe you check the http://frugaltheme.com/. Looks nice and is very clean.
- Chirag
at first I thought that css file was missing & tried refreshing the browser twice or thrice :)
Content is what lasts - whatever the package; and that's indeed one of the aspects of feeds: transmitting raw materials. But form and research of a form according to meaning principles is what design is about.
I really enjoyed reading this short report on your experimentation.
* also: I recommend you to get and read some issues of Dot Dot Dot magazine - http://www.dot-dot-dot.us/ if you're willing to explore form, then i think it's a very good opportunity to discover this fantastic publication.
Seriously, you want to make a point about not caring for advertisement revenue? Well, you haven't blogged anything useful for some time either. So, why care at all?
I'll bet Jakob Nielsen would love this spare design.
Any successful copywriter would tell you to emphasize content over design. Designers will give you white text on a black background (looks cool, unreadable). Copywriters will give you black text on a white background (no look, readable). The easier your content is to read, the more people will read it. This extends to strong headlines and subheds, great ledes, useful commentary, etc. It's about the content, not the design.
Design should enhance readability and organization. Unfortunately, too many sites suffer from artdesigneritis, where the design looks great in a frame, but is fundamentally unreadable. Thank G-d for RSS feeds.
Classic book whose rules of copywriting and design still apply, and answers the question you pose re: "should I have a "nice" design?" Read the section on "Print." You'll find the answer is "yes," if you redefine what "design" means. http://u.nu/6zz
I think, like most things, a good compromise is probably ideal here. The best designs (think Apple) are often minimalist - but that doesn't mean no design. It often means much much harder design, actually. Throwing stuff out and paring things down is tough.
So take the good feedback (I can verify that high-res monitors aren't as nice on this design, for example) and incorporate them into a new design - but keep it simple and barebones still.
Best of both worlds = EPIC WIN.
Robert
... but the current lack of presentation will not serve you well in the long term as it fails to
1. position you as a professional,
2. be easily recognized (I came by way of you at FC)
3. (Sorry for this one) but keep up with whats looking hot, we are shallow beings and judge way too soon on what is good value and sometimes its not based on anything than how it looks...
My suggestion is get engage a quality designer to layout your blog with a given brief of "simple and clean" as a part of the brief...
Keep blogging ...love your stuff...Alex
Just set your default font to sans-serif; then folks' computers will choose their default sans-serif font (and if they've customized it, it will keep with their preferences).
Sans-serif has been proven (through usability testing) to be easier to read on screen than serif.
I expect that the stats for viewers to the blog actually increases when Robert makes comments on the design because all of us using RSS visit the blog to see what he means.
Rick.
Obviously design shouldn't distract from the content but there's been many studies showing that visitors form an opinion of you (company/brand) within a second or two based on the design, long before they read anything. It's why most notable brands spend money on design and it's not being wasted. In fact, it's one of the cheapest ways to polish and influence your brand image.
I think there are a lot of people who equate "cool looking" with "design", and I'm with all those commenters who point out that simple and usable is a design, and think Google (and, yes, Craigslist, which I check regularly) succeed because of their designs, not in spite of them.
I rather suspect that those who complained about the font are either using "ClearType" (snicker) or have their system font set weirdly (perhaps that means the default), and in this day of 26"+ wide monitors who runs their web browser full screen any more? I definitely like having text layout which adapts to how I want to view it, rather than enforcing how I have to.
Hope whatever you end up with maintains the aspects of this that keep it usable.
And if you are a designer - it better show some design...
You get my drift...
A lot of blog and website become so busy you don't know where to go - and bad design is far worse than simple plain...
For me, your theme now is really good looking.
Thanks for sharing.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofe...
As a nearly complete convert to a variant of hard-core direct marketing known as 'Kennedy-style' or 'GKIC' (see http://dankennedy.com) that is only now, grudgingly, admitting that decent design does not, in fact, depress response rates when we keep our eyes on the ball, I walk a fine line almost every minute between design for its own sake and design to help make the sale. So I love it when I get ammo from reputable sources like alap.
Because I just can't do ugly.
Oh - as to Times Roman: It doesn't have to suck. Just set it biggish, in light weights, and kern it to a fare-thee-well. 'Course, it's hard to kern web type, but that's why you set it big, so you can tighten the letterspacing to the point that nobody notices. Use the light weight for body text at about 14px and h1 heads at about 24px or bigger; mix with h2 and h3 heads in Arial Bold or Trebuchet Bold. The h3 subheads should be the same size as the p text; the h2 subheads can be somewhat bigger, maybe 16-18 px.
On the subject of type running acrosse the browser window, I agree absolutely. Type gets hard to read at about 52 characters long; even a bare-bones, no-style design should still at least have a container that declares the main-content column won't make anyone read farther across than that.
And, finally, if we listened to every one of our esteemed male colleagues over 40 on the subject of readable type, we would never design anything except 12-point black type on white. Or 18-point black type on white.
Guys, I went presbyopic starting on my 40th birthday and today can't see the lines on my own hand. (The fingers are going fast.) I wear bifocals with two strengths of close - one for the computer and one for reading papers. When I drive I look over the top to see the road and the rest of the panorama in the distance (and look through them to see the speedometer and the rest of the in-car controls) and take them off to play tennis, at which point I can no longer read the numbers on the balls, to return strays to the next court. All of this is prelude to my most earnest entreaty: If you can't read the type, please, just put on your glasses - your wife spent hours picking them out and I'm sure they look great on you!
Guy Kawasaki 10-20-30. Yep, the PowerPoint rule, but on websites. 10-20-30 makes PowerPoints easier to read and less noisy. Make it easy for your people to find and digest your content. Bigger fonts reduce what you can put on a page and suddenly you have a box to work inside. Suddenly you have to decide to tell your story in half the words. Or even better, no words but a single picture. You get a boundary to work within. Such boundaries inspire the most creativity in people. I tell you that you can only use 33 lines to tell your user what's up, and you write a tighter story. I tell you that you have only 15 minutes to present a business and you have DEMO. I tell you you only have 140 characters to announce something and you have Twitter.
Bottom line, bigger fonts make for clearer boundaries on how much to present, which really makes you focus on what to present.
Long post, but I am absolutely passionate about the play between design and content.
http://www.enbargain.com