Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

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In this case, content is material that I the consumer am interested in. I'm potentially interested in writing. I'm less interested in design. I don't read blogs to look at the design, I read blogs to read blogs. So if you're capable of creating logical, readable designs time and time again, go for it.

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.

Thanks for your detailed response. I agree that smashing did a piss-poor job in presenting this stuff - but I think they linked to some examples that do it really well. You are 100% spot-on with the font size/color/weight stuff.

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 think you make a number of really valid points here.

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.

Creating a magazine is very similar to creating a web site in that you need to think ahead in organizing content logically before creating multiple layouts that comprise the whole document (itself a collection of smaller documents).

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.

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