Art Directed
There has, of late, been talk in the webdesign community about moving away from static templates and embracing individual, art-directed pages. Khoi Vinh tried it with A Brief Message and Jason Santa Maria is currently experimenting along the same lines on his blog. Neither effort is particularly effective thus far, lacking both the beauty of great design and the immediacy of great blogs.
In both cases it is a problem of overheads and maintenance: it takes time and energy to design something interesting on a regular basis. In my experience, when bloggers start thinking too hard they tend to stop writing. You may say that you could publish less and work on the quality, but that is anathema to the conversational nature of blogging.
I myself have been thinking in a vague, procrastinatory way about expanding the remit of this website. The main thing is to keep writing on a daily basis in the vain hope of becoming a more accomplished prose stylist, but perhaps the site can be improved and expanded without losing focus. Vinh’s Subtraction remains the gold standard for including lots of interesting information in a simple, unobtrusive, aesthetically beautiful way.
Other ones I like include:
Squawk Design, which has a well-integrated design portfolio. My only problem with that is that I can never think of very much to say about the designs in my portfolio.
Raduceuca, which is nice and colourful and includes all the things that used to be on this site: twitter, delicious sidelinks, flickr photos. Frankly, I am bored of social networks in general and don’t particularly want to pollute my site with other people’s twitty apps.
Equivocality. Of course, I could try and integrate my photography in a more regular way, as I did with my very enjoyable photojournal, but alas I don’t have enough to time to maintain one.
No, less is still more. If I am going to make any changes it will be to improve access to the archives and make it easier embellish the posts. If you, dear reader, have any suggestions please leave them below!