Back to Basics—Less Noise, Better Reading

Tadaima. This blog relaunch has taken me back to coding for the first time in about two years, and I’m loving it. And with refreshed blogging comes a refreshed site—starting in sunny yellow.

But whilst everyone else out there is busy experimenting with grids, I’m sticking one middle-finger-like column in the middle of the page and seeing what I can do with it.

Grid-based design is an essential skill and a methodology I apply every day at work, but it encourages canvas widths in the 900’s to allow greater layout variations. This has fueled the trend for more and more content on the page, meaning everyone fills it up with whatever tag clouds, archive lists or nested categories their CMS can spit out. The result? Pages and pages of beautifully aligned noise detracting from the actual posts.

So for the meantime I’m going back to basics—cutting back the interface and concentrating on improving the reading experience. A bit more practice with the writing won't go amiss either.

Jul 02 2009