On site design and minimalism

It was only after I had determined the new css design for Cubicle Muses and Peregrinari that I came across a string of recent articles on minimalism in sight design. In no particular order:

• Mark Pilgram on ‘Minimalism’
• Ryan Tomayko’s site
• James Bennett on Minimal site design
• Jonas Arnfred’s ifany article on Minimalism

While I love artfully designed websites, I’ve come to appreciate skillful typography even more. So when I set out to redesign my own weblog, typographical style and readability were on the top of my list. I’ve come to abhor the typical news-site or portal look that plagues the internet these days. Case in point, I came across a Slashdot article today from Computer World:

At the time of writing this article, the Computer World website uses a 960 pixel wide template, but the article column is a narrow 275 pixels. That’s only 28% of the site width dedicated to the main content. Worse yet, the Computer World splits articles across multiple pages.

The last iteration of Cubicle Muses was also guilty of a fairly narrow content column and small fonts, two of the main targets for revision this time around. I also removed most of the sidebar links and stuffed all the extra information I wanted down into a massive footer. Derek Powazek’s old article ”Embrace Your Bottom” won me over on that matter. So now the footer not only shows relevant site links, but also aggregates all my other social network feeds such as Twitter and del.icio.us. The drawback is right now all of this is loaded using extra JavaScript and it slows down the site. So I’m thinking of caching this data on the server.

Each article also gets its own mini-footer which is particularly prominent on the Peregrinari site. I’m considering expanding the information in these article info blocks, but I need do so without adding too much clutter.

One of the more controversial choices I’ve made is to use non-standard fonts in the CSS. If you’re running a Mac (or have the Futura and Optima fonts installed), you’ll see the site in all its glory. However, the site looks just fine with Lucida or even Arial. I’ve become a fan of using non-standard fonts on websites as long as the design degrades properly.

Tags are also gone, but that’s partly because the implementations for Radiant are old. I might add them back in at another time, but honestly, looking in my logs, most people never used them. Most traffic to this site comes from search engines or newsfeeds anyway. Instead, I’ve gone with a simple chronological list of articles.

So far, I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s not as minimal as the other sites I linked to above, but it’s an improvement over the last iteration. More iterations are certain to follow. The site is slower than I’d like and there are still validation errors in the markup. But I’ve been fiddling with this redesign on and off (mostly off) since Christmas and I just wanted to get it out and get some feedback. So let me know what you think.