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 th