The death of the blog post (and rise of the blogazine)
smashingmagazine.com
smashingmagazine.com
In seriousness though, those people they mentioned don't just have interesting designs with each article--they also have interesting content. Dressing up a "Top 10 WordPress Plugin" post in a special skin isn't going to make it any less shallow. However, maybe designing a skin for an article forces people to think more about what they are writing. After all, it'd be a waste not to put effort into the content if so much effort is being put into the design. I really just want more interesting content.
Conventions may be boring, but they allow us design duffers to focus on the content itself.
I really like the way they are presenting information -- there really is a problem on the web of nav-on-the-top-and-left, ads-on-the-right, boring presentation and it's good to see someone trying other things. Having said that, I don't think they got it quite right wrt the scrolling/page-down flow. I'd like to see something like this that was a bit more screen orientated. Their example is more like something I like to see on a tall poster and doesn't fit screen browsing quite right. I don't know what the answer looks like though.
In rare cases special formatting can enhance the effect or help interpret something written, but in most cases it adds nothing except clutter. I found this article nearly unreadable because of the "interesting" and "exciting" way they presented it.
http://gregorywood.co.uk/journal/top-5-spielberg-films
I really think consuming that article is more satisfying than yet another top 10 list with a hastily pasted thumbnail of the movie art.
In addition, they also forget the newspapers. They are always identical from day-to-day. Just because it might be easier to style a "Top X" list doesn't mean it still isn't a useless "Top X" list.
I like and admire good graphic design. But not as much as I like and admire good writing. Does anyone think sites like Metafilter or HN would benefit from an orgy of visual style?
I agree with the comments here that the smashing article went overboard; what particularly annoyed me was the use of different colored words for emphasis instead of bold or italic. I kept thinking those were links and obsessively moused over them to check. In their overzealous sale of the idea I think they definitely missed the mark about how design should work with the content. This is exactly what Jason Santa Maria points out in his post.
He specifically mentions that he may not always have time or the inclination or possibly even a need to do something special for each post. If that's the case he has a great default template for such articles. I highly recommend reading Jason's original article of a more sane and reasonable version of the idea.
Because your comments may dissuade people from reading the article who may otherwise enjoy it.
> Do you really think that I'd be poised to launch the next Earth-shattering blogazine, if only I understood the subtle point of this article?
No.
> Or were you just trying to be clever, without demonstrating any insight of your own?
No.
If you're going to criticize someone for "missing the point" you should at a minimum explain what it is they don't get, that way you demonstrate that it is not you who has missed the point
Their question as to whether blogging is "too easy" really resonates with me: I began prototyping a CMS a while back on the premise that Blogging Should Be Harder (a reaction of sorts, I guess, to services like Posterous and Tumblr [full disclosure: I am a very happy user of the latter]). And what I found is that if it's hard to design a "blogazine"--manually setting type and choosing colors for each individual post--it's just as challenging to build an "anything goes" CMS.
I still think it's a great idea. There might only be a handful of people out there who would use it, but those that did would likely be producing really top-notch content.
What's the difference between your theoretical CMS and a WYSIWYG HTML editor? Something like Weebly or Google Sites? I'd think they already cover the "custom HTML" tactic pretty well. Beyond that the only thing you could possibly offer is custom graphic design, right? Or were you thinking pre-build templates in certain styles, the way iWeb offers for web design?
Well the difficulty really arises when you want to go a step beyond full HTML control and allow for JS and AJAX (think pagination with really artful page transitions). How do you allow users complete control without turning your service into a cesspool of XSS attacks?
The best way to present information is not always text on plain background. This should be obvious for anybody who has had to visualize data to make it understandable. The blogazine idea carries data visualization forward from quantitative to something more qualitative.
Pah. Text is good for people who can think about what they're reading rather than what they're seeing. They are my audience (such as it is).
appearance != content
But that's not happening. This article was not very readable: It broke itself up into fractious chunks, highlighted words in the middle of normal sentences, and generally jizzed.
I love that it brings up normal magazines and says they'd be boring if they looked the same. Newsflash: Normal magazines do look boring. When I read an editorial, it looks the same week after week. When I read articles, sure, there're big quotes and pictures and the text is laid out differently, but the writing itself sticks to the same font/size consistently. That's what makes it readable.
The problem with the blogazine is that most blog posts don't have enough content for what they're dealing with. A 10-page magazine article with a hundred potential photos can use a layout. A page-long article that's blogazined is fluffing up without providing shit. People who're so easily wooed by designers that they still ooh and aah at big fonts, they eat it up, but readers who want a no-bullshit presentation are turned away.
I think the idea with some of the posts is that it allows for random access rather than linear - and I think there is some value in exploring a page to see what it contains for some readers. Quality is still probably the most important aspect as you said.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately through the lens of late-19th- and early-20th century European philosophy and literary theory, when guys like Gautier and Baudelaire and Mallarmé and Benjamin and Kraus were livid about the rise of the newspaper and, later, the feuilleton (early serialized novels). These men--poets, mostly, or at least advocates of the form--saw the confines of the newspaper column as a reduction of writing proper, where writing (in their strict poetic sense) necessitated a careful consideration of the placement of each word on the page.
The same considerations can well be applied to blogging, at least on an abstract formal level. You're very right: it all falls apart if there's not ample content to back up a thoughtful design. But it is probably still the case that while a great design may do little for mediocre writing, great writing can be held back by mediocre design.
Within a magazine these multiple different layouts must be arranged such that the information can be readily digested while keeping the presentation dynamic. This principle of balancing the tensions between the dynamic and the uniform is the very heart of crafting publications. You see it at work in very conservative publications as it is in very edgy publications.
Certain articles (typically featured articles) get a much stronger visual treatment than others in order to create a visual hierarchy of importance. That's where this "blogazine" (whatever the hell that means) approach to designing content becomes yet another tool and asset in your skillset.
Layout and content design are not ideological positions of one wav vs. another. A competent designer balances and plays with these tensions to present information appropriate to the audience with regard to the topic at hand.
appearance ∈ content
I'm not saying that this is not a great idea for a new content type, but it seems to me that the intersection of people who are good at web design and people who are good at writing (about things that aren't web design) is probably a fairly small set (in comparison to the set of people who are good at writing).
You also have to notice that the signal to noise ratio in a magazine (feels to me) much higher in a traditional print medium than it is in a magazine. The text gets stretched out over a much larger area (although the trade off is worth it for magazines where the pictures help to tell the story).
A lot of the time, the design is there in order to cover up the apparent lack of information in the magazine. Have you ever read Cosmo? It is mostly full-page advertisements.
Although that does bring up the fact that you could monetize a blogazine really easily by including full-page advertisements and making it so you have to scroll through it. Imagine one of those really pretty magazine-style photo-adds on a blogazine, I would imagine that the click through rate would be pretty good, and you could charge just for showing the add.
Appearance and textual content meet somewhere (otherwise we would all be using HTML 1.1 or whatever), but I doubt we will be seeing full-blown blogazines go mainstream any time soon simply because of the technical skill involved (and how bad it will go if you don't pull it off properly).