ekloff

The web is such a convenient method to bring information to people with ease on both sender and receiver. But many things need to be considered. Everything you see online is provided by a computer, with it’s own operating system, unique software and fonts. It relies on a browser to present the website, which uses a particular engine to translate everything according to standards, with sites implementing an assortment of languages to code everything. HTML is the most common and universal, but more and more technologies are complimenting it.

When I design or analyze web designs I first notice text length/line width. If I have to stretch my browser into a tiny window or if horizontal stretches of text are default in the layout, I will instantly dislike it. I like a fixed-width so no matter how large your computer screen is, you don’t have to trace the line of 8 pt. text a foot and a half to find the next bit of information. In the little sketch above, I’m drawing out the skeleton of what I might redesign my website. Type scale is also important to me. I want to be able to get as much information but in an organized way. A contained but legible font size for the body and strong markers for headers and subheads are also key.

Now let’s take a look at a website with the same content but with completely different structures. FINGERTIPS is a blog/website that finds legal quality legal music, handpicked and with informative reviews. I visit the site because of what it offers, but it comes in two flavors: a blogspot blog with a vertical orientation and sidebar of little value (below); the other is the original page which fills the page and more content is visible when the page first loads (right).

Unfortunately, I dislike both designs because they don’t solve the problem of providing maximum content in an accessible way. I can live with both designs, but they seem to be solving only one portion of a larger problem. The aesthetics are minimal, which is usually a good thing, but it might benefit from a little push. Typically, the weekly discoveries come in threes, so why not have three columns per post? That brings the titles higher on the page and next to each other for further reading of all three at the will of a slight scroll of the page.

The rest can be separated by color blocks, or divided lines, or by graphic separators.