Designer Blogs
Magazines and newspapers have had three hundred years to figure out the balance between content and form. Some of them still don’t get it. Some of them do. One of the many reasons I like magazines is the way they allow form and content to influence each other. Magazines usually contain different kinds of articles, some short, some long, some serious, some not, some heavily visual, some almost exclusively text, and a magazine is free to lay each article out in a way that suits it. Just like people: man and woman, young and old, short or tall, skinny or fat, black or white or yellow, gay or straight — people differ, and different clothes fit different people. You wouldn’t attempt to design a unisex outfit that fits both your grandma and the pimp down the street, the world’s tallest man and the world’s shortest woman, your kid and your mom, the supermarket clerk and the executive, the nightclub and the office. We recognize that different contexts and different physical properties require different outfits. And texts — perhaps I should say multimedia posts, in the case of blogs — also differ, which is why there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for laying them out either. Texts are written in different contexts and have different attributes, too. Labeling all the different layouts that well-designed magazines employ to present their content “visual experimentation” is absurd.
Rory Marinich disagrees with me when I say I want more “designer blogs”, where different posts have different layouts, different colors, different typography. He writes:
I find that a carefully-picked theme stays exciting no matter how long I look at it. The design of Hacker News still appeals to me like it did when I first discovered it; John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is as sublime a design as it was two years ago, with minimal changes. What makes those sites feel so timeless is the logic that went into their design. Neither site has structures or sections or appendages that they don’t need. The result is that their design fades gracefully into the background, leaving only the content.
I won’t say much about Hacker News, because I think its design is ugly and a poor rip-off of reddit, but I’ll hand it to him: Daring Fireball is beautiful. It’s one of the most well-designed blogs on the internet. The biggest change Gruber has done to the site in recent years is change the font on some of the headers, and that made the design worse (at least on Windows), not better. Even if I’m about to choke from the Mac Superiority Complex on display I can still look at that shit for a long time, because it’s so beautiful. But even so, I wouldn’t say that the site doesn’t grow stale if you stare at it too much. Everything does look the same, and I’m not convinced that every one of John Gruber’s articles are best served in their current layout, that none of them could be more effective if the design was more flexible. Not to mention the fact that any design is constraining in itself; certain layouts lend themselves better to certain styles of content than others, so that the template itself may be a constraint on the creativity of the blogger. Rory seems to understand this:
Perhaps I’m biased. I’m in the process of creating a unique site design for myself; the design I used last year was generic, so this is in many ways the first time I’ve created something for myself that was designed to fit me, fit my work, from the ground up. For a while I considered launching a blog like Dustin Curtis’s and styling every post differently, but I decided against it. I place more valuable in a consistent styling than I do in visual experimentation; rather than creating a bare-bones structure, I tried to create a single template that would fit everything I cared to write about. That’s the challenge of theme design. It’s the part of design that gets denied by those showier blogs.
I love designing blogs. I used to design for myself and release my old themes, but in the past few months I’m discovering a certain passion for it that I didn’t know existed. Now I approach the challenge of designing themes somewhat differently. I’m not giving a blog its look, I’m giving it its feel. I can’t control what appears on the final product, so instead I make something that’s capable of fitting certain things in a certain order. The design I create for a blog is going to influence what that blog’s capable of saying and how it’s able to say it.
You’re never going to create the perfect template that fits everything equally well. That means you’ll either have to constrain yourself or fight the template by putting content into it that doesn’t fit, that would be better served in another layout. I guarantee you, without major tunnel vision and interests so narrow even your fellow übergeeks can’t appreciate them, you’re not going to create a single template that captures everything you ever want to write about. It’s not going to happen. I can’t do it, you can’t do it, John Gruber can’t do it. Even if he could, that’s not the point: I never said every blog should be a “designer blog” where every post is custom designed, I only said I wished more people would try it. Nor did I even use the words “every post”, and if you check out the archives of the blogs I mentioned, Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis, you’ll find that both employ what are more or less post templates. They recognize that not every post is so totally different from everything that came before that it needs its own radically different design. They just think some do. I happen to agree.
Since I’m more comfortable criticizing myself than I am criticizing others (although I do enjoy that occasionally), I’ll continue harping on my own design. It’s “minimalist”. Minimalism being the one style that any idiot with a modicum of skill, a small dose of aesthetics, patience and some common sense can do well. Not that anyone can do it, but most could, if they’d just put in a little effort and had the sense to consider whether or not every element on their site contributed meaningfully to anything but their own ego. (Hint: few of them do.) Anyway, back to my own design. It’s not the best in the world, and it probably contains more elements than it needs, but it’s still reasonably minimal. This means it fits everything equally well, which is to say that everything looks equally mediocre. This design does not boost any of the content. If I’ve done well, it fades into the background and lets the content take over. This is an important point to make: so long as the presentation isn’t an eyesore, I won’t turn my back on good writing just because the presentation is unexciting; I will turn my back on beautiful presentation if what it’s presenting isn’t good content. I have no doubt, though, that some of what I write would be better served by another form. Because of technical and personal limitations — I don’t know how to make Tumblr do what Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis do, and I’m not a great designer, so I know I can’t come up with a significant portion of good, original designs — I won’t do it, but I wish more people would abandon the templates (or rather, stop leaning on them all the time — leaving them behind some of the time is enough).
Rory continues:
Those blogs where everything’s custom-designed work like compositions. They marry the visuals of what they’re saying with the language they’re using to create, hopefully, a finished and polished product. Everything has to work together. Usually it doesn’t: Either the images overpower the writing, or they’re inconsequential additions that work as eye candy but clutter the page.
It’s the problem magazines run into, too: Some are very good at consistently creating beautiful combinations of the two, but most are wasting a lot of time making blandly unique layouts that nobody cares about. When magazines made the switch to the web I realized how much I liked the consistency of having black text on a white background. When I read magazines I find myself irritated by the layout. It distracts me from what matters. (…)
Not everything you write is so important to deserve its own twee layout. If it was, I’d suggest that you revise how you write, because those unique typesettings work best to disguise a lack of content on the part of the writer. Those blogs I know that pay such attention to designs are blogs I don’t read. Without exception they lack consistency and fail to hold my attention.
I absolutely agree that this is really hard to do. That’s why more people should be doing it: the more people are doing something, the more shit there’s going to be, but there’s also going to be more gold. Even if only a few of these blogs are great, that’d still be wonderful. I also agree that moderation is key: not everything is its own special snowflake that needs its own special twee layout.
If the blogs that “pay such attention to designs” are blogs you don’t read, that create extravagant designs to “disguise a lack of content on the part of the writer”, that’s the fault of those blogs, not the form. Returning to the clothing metaphor, this sounds like saying every girl who has lots of outfits and enjoys dressing up is necessarily shallow. Some of them are, sure — but some ugly people are shallow too. Even if most of them are — and I’m not saying they are, but assuming that were the case — there would still be some who aren’t. The same thing applies to blogs. There’s no a priori reason why creating custom layouts for blog posts should serve only as a disguise for poor writing. Some messages are going to be better served by a different layout. Some “designer blogs” are going to be great; some aren’t. Some will be occasionally good and often bad; some vice versa. So it goes.
You could argue that your message is too important to risk crashing and burning by creating a bad custom layout. But chances are your message isn’t that important, and even if it is, maybe it’s worth the risk. Maybe you hit on a form that makes your message much more effective.
Perhaps the best would be to have the designer and the writer be different people. These “designer blogs” are run by designers, and the designers both write, layout and typeset their articles. That’s usually not how magazines work. People work better when they work on what they do best. Typographers and print designers respect the content, and the author of the article respects that the typographers and print designers know how best to lay the content out in print. Sometimes, with the right people, it works beautifully. Many magazines haven’t found the right balance, but some have, showing that it’s not the basic idea that’s faulty, just many implementations of it.
By the way, the two blogs I mentioned in my original post, although they may at times suffer from overdesign and although their designs may at times serve to obscure lack of substance, aren’t all bad. They do contain pieces I’d consider good writing, pieces that ironically may have been better served by a more austere design. I also forgot to mention another website that does this unique-designs thing: A List Apart, which Jason Santa Maria art directs and Kevin Cornell illustrates. Each issue is subtly different from the last, and most articles have illustrations, but ALA does it so subtly that you almost don’t notice. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that ALA is just as well-designed as Daring Fireball.
