Impact issue 191 designs
I’ve just spent the last week in Nottingham designing the first issue of Impact Magazine and I thought I’d share a few of the pages that I’ve designed:
Visual archives at Astheria
Archives are often something that are left until the last minute and I don’t think anyone really considers how best to create them. Designers often throw together a chronological list of posts and leave it at that. However, I stumbled across a design by Kyle Meyer today that’s a brilliant solution to the archive problem. On his website Astheria, he represents his archive visually, altering the distance between posts to show fluctuations in frequency.
Clever, isn’t it? How is it done? Well all he’s done is dynamically style the list items, altering their top margin according to the difference in dates. I guess that this is done in a custom PHP script he’s written to grab and display his blog content. The rest is just done with CSS.
Word Clock, a typographic screensaver
Here’s an awesome little piece of design; the Word Clock screensaver. All it does is tells the time in beautiful, simple type. It’s a neat idea implemented really well and if you have a Mac, I recommend that you check it out.
Thunderbolt redesign launches
My games website Thunderbolt has received a visual overhaul today, with a cleaner design and a number of new features.
The eighth version adopts a minimalist style which is designed to detract from article text and images as little as possible. I paid special attention to making the site as legible as possible and I’m really pleased with the result.
Aside from the visual adjustments, the new site also introduces comments for the first time and dispenses with the news. I asked myself what people enjoy doing the most and writing news was obviously that. Now the site is firmly focused on reviews, features and opinion, hopefully offering a credible alternative to the likes of GameSpot and IGN.
How (not) to design a videogames website
As any designer knows, ‘whitespace’ or ‘negative space’ can make websites more legible and easier to digest. Whenever I layout a page for print or the Web, I actively monitor how much negative space there is around, then use it to balance out text and images. However, in the world of videogames websites, this and many other best practices are often discarded in the relentless pursuit of squeezing as much content and advertising space into view as possible. This, then, is a guide to how not to design a videogames website, using a number of the most popular sites on the Web.
1. Anything you can see is fair game
GameSpot is one the worst designed videogames websites and a fine place to begin. The entire background is given over to advertisers, with the main content pushed into a narrow column, leaving no negative space whatsoever. The typography and colours within this main section may be consistent, but the overall impression given by the overpowering array of colour is a negative one. Any focal point that the page had quickly disintegrates in the mess that unfolds and the user is left to navigate their way through the treacherous sea of advertisements in search of content.
2. Put content on multiple pages
I’m not sure who came up with this dastardly trick first, but I’m pretty sure that it was an advertising or marketing committee. The theory goes something like this, “if we make people load more pages, they’ll see more ads, click them and make us a ton of money!” How anyone could think that this is a good thing for the user is beyond me. Unless the article is ridiculously long, it should stay on one page. It takes long enough to load a single GameSpot page, let alone two or three.
3. Make the actual article difficult to read
Typography on the Web is just as important as it is in print. Yet some sites like IGN don’t seem to understand this. Their articles seem to use the default line-height and a font size which is too small, making them difficult to read. Most of the other large videogames sites get this right, leaving IGN sticking out like a sore thumb.
4. Take a commercial break
If the amount of ads on the larger videogames sites like 1UP wasn’t enough already, some of them have the cheek to halt your progress through the site to show you an huge commercial. Users don’t pay attention to this sort of brute force advertising; all they want to do is find the ’skip to content’ button as quickly as possible.
5. Put anything you like on the site navigation
IGN’s site navigation is comical at best. Not only is it split up, but it extends down the page for what seems like forever. The most relevant options may be towards the top, but that still doesn’t excuse the excessive number of those available. Having too many navigation links like this slows the user down, prolonging the process of finding what they’re looking for.
Follow the leader
I’m not saying that every large videogames website should ignore its commercial responsibilities in favour of beautiful aesthetics, but it wouldn’t hurt to use some common sense in their designs. It can be done; Eurogamer has plenty of ads and uses the multiple page trick, but its navigation is concise, the typography is sound and doesn’t take breaks like 1UP. In fact, it’s the only moderately well designed large site out there.
There are hundreds of videogames websites, but many of them are much smaller that the ones I’ve mentioned so far. The trouble is that the designers of these second and third tier sites often replicate the layout and practices of GameSpot et al, resulting in a plethora of badly designed sites. Such poverty of design has become so commonplace that it’s now accepted as normal, and that’s a real shame.
Impact 189 designs
Another batch of pages that I’ve designed, this time for Impact issue 189.
Editorial
News
Travel
Style
Famous Last Words
The newspaper is dead! Long live the newspaper!
The other day I was travelling up to London in the commuter rush hour and I noticed something; everyone was reading a newspaper. Britain is one of the largest, if not the largest, consumer of newspapers per capita in the world, so this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Yet we keep hearing that their days are numbered, so I began to wonder if that was actually true.
Being a student these days means that you’re constantly thinking of what you’re going to do after you leave university. Just having a degree isn’t enough any more; you have to stand out as being ultra-employable in the now highly competitive graduate job market. After seeing all these employed people reading newspapers, I decided to buy my own and attempt to figure out the attraction.
I bought The Guardian and one story caught my eye, “Forget free CDs, report advises newspapers”. A quarter-page article, it focused on a report by consultants Ernst & Young which talked about online advertising models and the problem of attracting younger readers. Here’s an extract:
“More than half of the UK’s 15-44-year-olds use the internet for their daily information and most of the content they access is free.
Younger age groups may never acquire the ‘paid-for newspaper habit’, says the report.”
This seems to be spot on; I get my daily news from the BBC website and via a number of specialist blogs through RSS feeds, all for free. Yet here I was, reading about the report in a paid-for newspaper.
I wondered; is reading a newspaper an institutional or generational habit? All these commuters around me were of the same age, but also worked in the same area. It was hard to tell. Maybe reading a newspaper is just one of the things you do when you go to work or maybe it’s just a dying tradition that the Web will make obsolete.
I think it’s a bit of both. Sure, previous generations are more likely to read them, but there’s something about newspapers which goes with employment and commuting. It’s good to have something to read on the way to and from work, something that’s cheap and informs you ready for the day ahead. It keeps you in the loop, able to discuss topical issues with friends and colleagues.
However, my generation won’t just pick them up as soon as we’re in full-time employment. It would be easy to live without them, with the temptation and perceived need for them is less. Newspapers then, have a fight for our attention on their hands.
One of the ways they can appear to be more modern and relevant to us is through design. I picked up The Guardian, but why that one? Although it might be regarded as more liberal than others and therefore more appealing to students, there are plenty of other respectable publications that you might choose.
The Guardian stands out for me is because its recent redesign makes it the only clean and modern newspaper out there. Block colour and a contemporary serif font are a few details which make it what is widely regarded as one of the best newspaper designs in the world.
So while The Guardian might carry stories predicting the demise of its own medium, it’s actually far safer than other publications when it comes to extinction. Its design sets it out as an established paper ready for the modern world and this should appeal to people like me who are approaching their ‘newspaper reading years’.
The art of looking sideways by Alan Fletcher
As books go, The art of looking sideways is a pretty big one. At 1066 pages, Alan Fletcher’s “primer in visual intelligence” is not something you can take with you to work or quickly use as a reference. It is, however, an interesting compilation of ideas which is well worth a look at.
Arranged in 72 chapters, The art of looking sideways is more a collection of anecdotes, quotations, odd facts and random material than a guide to design. There are no rules or guidelines, but instead numerous snippets of knowledge. In a way, it is about everything and nothing, a compendium of thoughts gathered through years of experience.
You can use it in a few ways. First of all, you could read it in a linear fashion, soaking up information chapter by chapter. You could also open a few pages a day at random and be inspired. Because of its massive size, you get the impression that every time you read it, you’ll find something new and that you’ll never exhaust it. Either way, you could use it for design ideas, since there is no visual consistency and every page has its own individual style.
The art of looking sideways is one of those coffee table books which might come across as overpriced and pretentious, but given a chance, it delivers on its promise to entertain and inspire.
Layout by Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris
I have a new resolution; to buy a design book every month. Sure, there are plenty of tutorials on the Web, but I find that books give you something extra in their tactile form.
Anyway, my first purchase is Layout, the second title in Ambrose and Harris’ Basics Design series. The 175 page book uses work by major studios to illustrate the rules of layout, primarily of print design. Some of the concepts cross over to the Web, but this is essentially a book for those interested in print publishing.
Layout goes through each topic, clearly explaining principles and backing them up with well chosen examples. You don’t have to have any prior knowledge to make the most of it, just a curiosity for how to get the most out of your pages.
I’m not sure if I would buy the entire series, but as a standalone book, Layout is a fine addition to any print designer’s library. It’s clear, concise and is a great book to have at hand when designing.
Threadless redesigns site, improves manufacturing and introduces custom packaging
I’ve written about Threadless on here before and I think they’re a perfect example of how to do business online and a brand worth evangelising. They never seem to be resting and are constantly improving the service they offer. The latest wave of Threadless updates sees a website redesign, improved shirt quality and new customised packaging.
The site has always allowed you to view clothing by size, type and line, but now you can do all three in one screen. Using a few well designed drop-down menus, you can mix and match criteria to view all the medium hoodies, for instance. Rolling over items also shows their design immediately too, further improving usability.
Threadless has also started to print its designs on its own brand shirts instead of just getting American Apparel or Fruit of the Loom to do it for them. I recently got a shirt through the post from them and the increase in quality is definitely noticeable. The material seems much thicker, feels nicer to touch and the actual print appears to be more vivid. The shirt quality was never bad, but now it’s even better.
They’ve also started using their own custom designed packaging, which made me smile the first time I saw it. As you can see below, it uses the same style and wit that the site embodies, adding a unique value to the product.
These updates are in completely different parts of their operation, but all three show Threadless’ commitment to improving their service.