"design" in Weblog

Developing and working with CMSs is a subject close to my heart at the moment for a couple of reasons, neither of which I think I can talk about, and two articles have helped me along no end.

The first was Scrivs’ timely MT vs. WP vs. TxP: Entry Page Design, in which he critiqued the design and usability of the 3 most popular blogging tools. He reached the same conclusions as I had but he seems to have used a lot more reasoning…!

Next is a set of articles called Building a Web Application that document the development of a CMS by Jonathan at Snook.ca. This set of articles run through the full development cycle from initial design decisions, through requirements gathering and specification to debating release license options. There’s a lot there.

Mike’s article on the ABC News Redesign has been discussed elsewhere already but I thought it might be worth drawing attention to his second-to-last paragraph ‘Another business case for web standards’. His business benefits include a 50% reduction in code size and an increased range of ad sizes they can offer thanks to CSS’s flexibility, with the added bonus of the site working on wireless devices. These are the kinds of statistics we need to help sell web standards in the real world so many thanks to Mike for the article.

It’s been a ridiculously busy few weeks but I have a couple of site launches to show for it. First up is a small one: Locus Design. I built this one with Draught Associates, who designed it. It’s simple but elegant, XHTML/CSS/Accessible… Um, that’s it I reckon. Thanks to Matt at Draught.

The next one is a touch bigger. Milo Creative asked me to come in and redesign the Ramblers Association site in time for the Freedom to Roam act to go on the law books. The timescale was very tight, giving us about 10 days from initial client meeting to launch, and the budget was limited but I’m very pleased with the result. The home page is live (with a couple of minor problems but should be sorted soon) and the content template is being rolled out across the site at the moment. It’s been very well received internally and I have my fingers crossed for the public at large.

On a technical note… This is my first commercial implementation of Mike Davidson’s sFIR (version 2.0b) and I’m dead impressed. The content will be edited by in-house teams and sFIR has allowed me to hand it off to them safe in the knowledge that the website’s typography will match my design and the off-line material.

Anyway, cheers to Sean at the Ramblers and Argy and Petros at Milo.

Happy Cog, Zeldman’s studio, have just announced their redesign of Amnesty International USA’s website, and a fine job they’ve done. On top of this they’ve helpfully decided to write up the process.

Now, the most interesting thing here is the header navigation system they’ve adopted, something close to my heart at the moment. I considered something similar for a site I’m doing at the moment but disgarded it because the categories didn’t balance enough for my liking. Now I’ve seen how well it works in practice I’m kicking myself for not persevering. On the other hand, I’m certain that we’re working with a tighter budget and with less time… [sigh].

I also really like the colour scheme they’ve chosen… It’s vibrant, exciting and a huge departure from what I expect from Amnesty - but in a good way. It reminds me slightly of Oxfam actually. The home page makes good use of imagery, something that’s always sold good causes to me, combined with a simple two column layout presenting the news alongside what you can do to help. It’s very well thought out and I think it’ll do very well for Amnesty.

Cameron Moll has had a great idea. How about you take a screenshot of whatever you’re working on right now and post a small 320x320px portion of it… Just enough to whet our apetite. He’s into 3 figures of posts and counting!

There are some really interesting ones in there… What’s Jon Hicks up to? Jason Santa Maria? Dan Cederholm? They’ve all posted.

In the article Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts it is revealed that people read fastest when text has no margins and sub-optimal leading. Conversely, comprehension is best with some nice margins and leading. That sounds a bit bizarre to me. but it reminds me of an article I read a couple of years ago. I can’t find the original link but the same findings are given in What is the optimal line length when reading prose text from a monitor? The 1999 experiments by Youngman and Scharff found that text on screen is read faster and more reliably with longer line lengths (8 inches at 12pt) but people preferred shorter line lengths (4-6 inches), while Dyson and Kipping determined that shorter lines (1.8 inches) were hard to read.

The obvious conclusions are that users prefer onscreen text displayed in blocks of 4-6 inches with margins and leading (even though they read fastest with longer lines and no margins).

I’d suggest that these findings support fixed line-length layouts over fluid layouts. I browse the internet on a wide-screen monitor with my browser maximised and fluid sites generally look terrible. Fixing columns, at least using ems would give me comfortable readability despite my extra-wide browser, and would take into account those folk who are viewing with larger text browser settings…

It would appear that EVERYONE is struggling with creative block at the moment… The first I heard of it was when Keith Robinson posted his article on Inspiration, where he listed his own sources of inspiration and appealed for other people to post theirs. Surely a cry for help… ;-)

Then I wandered over to Dez’s blog and found that he had a summary of articles on How to be creative, my favourite being How to come up with creative ideas from Ivan at CreativeBits. I often go for a walk or head for the gym when I’m having trouble getting my ideas together - the change of scenery seems to do the world of good, so I really like the fact that Ivan has incorporated this into his design methodology. I think I might just copy him…

Dez also gives his own favourite source of inspiration, Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto, which is a bit of a gem.

p.s. I just read through the Incomplete Manifesto again and it’s now my favourite too. Sorry Ivan.

Dunstan launched an updated version of his site last week to much acclaim in the blogging community. On the face of it, he’s not done an awful lot but have a proper look around and you start to notice all the details… A lot of personality has gone into the redesign and his attention to detail is astonishing. Even better, he’s now writing a series of articles explaining what he’s updated and how he did it. The best so far details his use of custom XML to separate his blog content from its presentation but his presentation of time is also great. Top marks to Mr Orchard.

Wow, the Zen Garden has done it again… The latest 3 designs are possibly my 3 favourites so far. Oceans apart isn’t anything groundbreaking but it’s incredibly elegant design very well executed. Start listening is a wonderful meeting of 50s advertising, wild west typography and modern design garnish. Lush. Finally, Springtime has a great feel to it with a novel use of horizontal tiling to allow the centered page to dominate the unused space. All round, great entries.

I’d been a little unimpressed lately with the proliferation of International Compliant design in one or two designs. CSS lends itelf to commercial-style design with straight lines and flat colours. That’s great for the industry (and it means that we can earn ourselves a living) but a site like the Zen Garden should be an opportunity to really try and push the boundaries - turn out pages that are interesting as well as elegant. There are enough examples in the Garden already that show that CSS can make it in the commercial world so it’s great to see some interesting designs coming out of the woodwork.

Woohoo! My Zen Garden submission made it… I’m dead chuffed about that and more than a little bit relieved.

I was trying to do something a little bit different to the other hi-design submissions they’ve had lately… something organic, instead of my usual clinical/minimal layouts. I started out trying to do a hand-drawn design but as I was searching through my scans archive for hand-writing samples I found this 7” packaging I’d saved ages ago. I loved the number of labels the people at the other end had managed to stick on one small piece of cardboard! Looking at it, it occurred to me that it could make quite an interesting basis for a design. And here we are!