21 Dec 2004 | Darrel said...

I dunno. Bitching about 'weblog design being stale' is sort of like saying 'all newspapers look the same'. They don't, but there are obvious norms that make sense given the subject manner and contribute to an overall 'similiarity' amongst them.

As for content, some interesting blogs I've added to my reading recently:

http://www.daddytypes.com
http://mocoloco.com/
http://www.regrettheerror.com/
http://www.widgetopia.net/

Nothing out of the ordinary. Look forward to seeing other responses...

21 Dec 2004 | Derek Nelson said...

In response to the Airbag article:

Aren't there always people that go, "Hey, [insert current popular trend] is getting old! Why are people still doing [insert current popular trend]?" Then people start going, "Yeah, you're stupid if you still do [insert current popular trend]." Then they all do [insert future popular trend].

What good does it do to keep talking about the fact that something is getting stale. There are always going to be innovators and those that follow. Instead of talking about everyone else not innovating, why not just do the innovating yourself?

Oops, my TV dinner's getting cold and I'm missing Judge Judy.

21 Dec 2004 | Dan Mall said...

The recently launched Bearskinrug by Kevin Cornell is a fresh concept. Content-wise, it's a blog of an illustrator, so it should prove to be able to address different subject than the typical web-designer/developer blog.

21 Dec 2004 | Greg said...

Wait a second. I never said "weblog design has gotten stale and hack". I said personal web design is a dying artform.

21 Dec 2004 | wayne said...

These well designed blogs;
Yellowlane
Shaun Inman.com
JustWatchTheSky

21 Dec 2004 | Jeff Croft said...

My opinion, as I expressed in Greg's comments, is sort of on both sides of the fence. Us agnostics never can choose. It's a cruse, really.

One on hand, the sort of typical blog design (a couple or three columns, comments below the article, etc, etc.) jsut works well. Like has been said -- books and newspapers meant to be read all look somewhat the same, too, for precisely this reason.

On the other hand, there was a time when not all personal sites were blogs, and there was some very creative independent publishing going on. I think what Greg is noticing (whether he realizes it or not) is not that all blogs are the same, but that all personal sites seem to be blogs, and therefore are very similar. Just like if all publications were newspapers, they'd all be very similar. But, we don't just have newspapers -- we've got books, magazines, brochures, etc, etc, etc.

And Wayne:

While Shaun, Josh, and Ryan all three of my favorite web designers and they are all brilliant, I'd argue that their blog designs are really that different. All three are great at the details -- their sites look amazing. But, at the core, they're still that same basic two or three column layout with a long list of posts running vertically down the page.

21 Dec 2004 | Dale Cruse said...

Apparently I was on Jeff Croft's mind when he wrote that first paragraph. Not sure if I should take that as a compliment or not.

Kinda funny that I'm agnostic also.

21 Dec 2004 | wayne said...

I hear you, Jeff. I was just going for pleasing detailed design. Which most blogs fail to accomplish (including mine).

I do not agree with Airbag Greg's "echo chamber" comment. Blogs have evolved into formats that "just work," as you put it. I see nothing wrong with that.

Once a process (newspapers, magazines, blogs?) mature to a certain level of efficiency they do not change much. At least not until the needs of the audience does.

21 Dec 2004 | jason said...

and how is this different than any design? Not every writer or weblogger is a designer or cares about design. And most designers follow the crowd anyway. There are exceptions, but a lot of design is about looking a certain way, not looking unique.

21 Dec 2004 | Ryan Schroeder said...

Yeah, it's not the design that's stale, it's the content. We need more cockeyed!

21 Dec 2004 | Jeff Croft said...

I do, in a way, agree with the "echo chamber" comment -- which, by the way, I'm not sure was Greg's. I believe it was mostly other comments that said that.

Blogs within a given community (like, say, the web standards community) often do echo the same things over and over again. But, I'm not sure this is avoidable or even a bad thing.

While I agree that this sort of general, two-column layout works very well for blogs, I don't think there's any reason to stop innovating. There are other ways to use this same layout more creatively, and there are probably other layouts entirely that will work well, too.

21 Dec 2004 | SU said...

I agree with Jeff's comment that "all personal sites seem to be blogs" wholeheartedly. People are shoehorning their illustrations, photographs, stories, and more into a format that may not be the best for the content itself. And I think that's the problem, moreso than any lack of creativity on the "look and feel" front.

21 Dec 2004 | Al Abut said...

I think what Greg means by "personal web design" is more like "experimental and edgy artsy sites" like the kind of you still see linked to aplenty on k10k, surfstation, and newstoday, the kinds of sites profiled in Joe Shepter's book. For example, Bearskin rug wouldn't be out of place in one of their link lists, if it hasn't already been posted there.
Perhaps the decline of purely experimental sites is just a relative illusion - it doesn't feel like there aren't as many as there used to be simply because there's an incredible flood of non-web designers enabled with personal websites through blogging tools today, combined with the fact that some of the best ones of yesteryear are gone or not maintained anymore.

21 Dec 2004 | Steven Urmston said...

Most blog sites, have a design, and then content is either just a long block of grey text, spewed out by a CMS. I often read stuff in RSS reader, as we all do. Thing is, I've seen the design, and it rarely has anything to do with the content, and in most cases is irrelevant to the subject matter of any particular post.

Personally I miss design innovation using the content. Yes its easy to hark on about the good ol days, but people did take the time to design web pages, rather than design a site, then stuff if full of content. More often than not I dont care whether Site A has a flashier/more innovative design than Site B, I rarely actually visit them anyways. If we want to pull people away from feeds, we should design the content, not the site.

21 Dec 2004 | tiffany said...

www.jeedub.com is my favorite personal web site. the detail is just amazing. but it's not a blog. and maybe that was the point.

21 Dec 2004 | SU said...

Great link, tiffany! That site is somewhat hard to navigate but well worth a visit.

22 Dec 2004 | Sara said...

What I want to know is, what exactly is wrong with the two column layout that most blogs seem to use? It might not be very original, but it's a format that works well, which is what should really matter. It seems to me that too much "creativity" in blog design might do nothing but obscure the content and make navigation harder. People keep complaining about the lack of originality, but interestingly enough I don't see anyone who's come up with a groundbreakingly creative design that also manages to present the content in a better way than the existing two column standard.

22 Dec 2004 | Ryan Schroeder said...

With blogs there's less time from stuff like "Megway". To much focus on, or it's too easy to, post daily.

22 Dec 2004 | Michal Migurski said...

"Back in the day, blah blah blah."

I'm with Derek Nelson (see above) on this one - public complaints about a form of expression or community losing its edge is a whole lot of hand-waving to cover up the fact that the complainer personally isn't excited about it anymore, for whatever reason. I've done my share of this, but ultimately it's more productive to go do *something else* when a particular domain loses its luster.

22 Dec 2004 | Joshua Kaufman said...

I was very tuned into the echo chamber in early 2003 when I read an entry on the topic on peterme, which made me think long and hard about why I was blogging:

When I stopped writing on my website a couple of months ago, I was surprised at how... concerned some people were. "Why did you stop writing?" I realized that, at the time, I really hadn't anything to say. I was posting out of obligation to an audience, not because the spirit moved me.

So I tried to stop blogging about what other people were blogging and focus on producing original content instead of adding to the deafening echo chamber.

Producing original content is hard, but it's necessary if we're going to have any meaningful dialogue about design.

22 Dec 2004 | p8 said...

For example, Bearskin rug wouldn't be out of place in one of their link lists, if it hasn't already been posted there.
The bear at the old bearskinrug is one of the coolest interactive widgets on a site ever!

22 Dec 2004 | kingbenny said...

I believe that for the most part, web design is far _better_ now than, say, 5 years ago, as far as usability and separation of style and content.. but a lot of that is because of the few standard templates running around that seem to work well. Design-wise, aesthetically, there may be less sites that stand out as truly unique, though.

22 Dec 2004 | steve said...

John Hicks of hicksdesign.co.uk, jason Santa Maria, graphicpush.com, kottke.org, noscope.com, simplebits.com, superflousbanter.com, stopdesign.com, and of course the css zen garden from Dave Shea shows tons of blog variation possibilities.

22 Dec 2004 | Guido said...

Hm, that's maybe just a shameless plug, but I actually tried and created a design for my weblog, haslo.ch.

I also think that with the current influx of many more sites, and with the availability of templates, the temptation to create a design of their own diminishes for many people. It's just way easier to take something that exists and just add content.

Also, while in the earlier days of the web, there were only a few people who created their own websites, and those normally were amazed by the technology and by the possibilities it provides. Now, more and more people have a website of their own, and there's lots of people who don't have the time to learn how to design something on their own, or who could design something, but simply don't want to, because they want to concentrate on something else.

But I agree, personal design, a Blog that really expresses some of the personality of its creator, is becoming more and more rare.

22 Dec 2004 | R. Marie Cox said...

Serco TransArctic is perhaps the best example of a personal site that incorporates a blog while retaining a high level of visual distinction.

The Man in Blue has a rather clever home page that effectively expresses his intricate knowledge of javascript and web standards; the site also has a blog, separate from the home page, located in the site's second tier that uses a more traditional column-based design. That separation between personal site (or portfolio in the MiB's case) and blog could allow the flexibility needed for more honest design experimentation without sacrificing usability in the blog portion.

(Just don't be surprised when everyone bookmarks and links to the blog instead of the home page.)

22 Dec 2004 | beto said...

Something I have learned from my longtime experience with weblogs and even my own personal site, is that there are only so much ways you can reinvent the weblog concept without falling back in the basics of such design approach. (The Serco and Bearskinrug sites are a nice example of how a weblog can be designed without looking like one though - I should take some cues ;)

However, if you have a weblog, it is assumed that you like to write /publish stuff and have your content be read - ergo, the writings/illustrations/photos/whatever are the content, the main course, raison d'etre of such site. Everything else are happy design compliments that may make the whole experience more pleasant, attractive or useable, but are not a "gottahaveit" for a weblog to become successful. Even if it's that from a web designer.

Plus, the adoption in favor of CSS demands much more design discipline, testing and coding know-how than most personal site auteurs are willing to put up with (specially if pretending something more than a "meh" 2-column layout), not to mention facing the insane scenario of unequal CSS support across browsers, coping with web standards and all that. Sort of like trying to put David Carson and Jakob Nielsen in a blender. And the RSS boom isn't very conducive to invest time and effort on site design either.

So what's a web designer to do? The weblog format is here to stay, and the convenience of using a CMS to manage content instead of an all-manual labor cannot be denied. I have to agree with Greg that the best bet is to break from the "echo chamber" and concentrate on producing original content whenever possible. It takes much more time and effort, but it should pay off in the long run.

Sorry for that longish rant ... just hope some of it makes sense.

22 Dec 2004 | wayne said...

I don't think I want Blog design to be very radical. Gradual change in response to users/readers needs and habits is working. Who has the time to figure out how to read or navigate a fancy new blog? The content is the prize. I want to get in, scan, read, comment (if so driven), and get on to the next blog. The list is only growing.

22 Dec 2004 | David Holtz said...

If you are a web designer, it is not impossible to carry over all the skills you have learned and make a valid site that doesn't look like a css site.

Nowadays, even the designers are trading in their design sense for structural markup. It does not have to be a trade. They can co-exist.

23 Dec 2004 | jkottke said...

Some different blog design elements: the randomly determined font styles for post titles on Hippoblog, the big text on Angermann2, and the layered experimental wonderful mess of Screenfull.

23 Dec 2004 | Maritn said...

Once again, people make the mistake of thinking that just because someone says something controversial, it must be worthy of analysis.

25 Dec 2004 | Moises Kirsch said...

Wasn't the web supposed to be about the content?

As long as the design is "nice" and "usable" it should be good enough, who wants to have the web full of slow flash based websites.

26 Dec 2004 | dmr said...

I think much of the original criticism comes from a lack of art on the web lately. Portfolios and blogs rule the day right now. I've been considering a new site myself which would approach content from a visual approach with video/motion/audio and much less text; or any text would be from a typographic perspective rather than a blog/writing one. I'm in agreement about the staleness and emulation; too many of us (myself included) are staying on the web for inspiration rather than looking to other sources.

I would say heavy.com started off as one of these sites; driven by design and good content. I'd like to see a return to the visual content and a leaving of the verdana/georgia set content.

05 Jan 2005 | seth said...

Check out this blog i designed for a few friends

The css is messed up in IE in a few spots, but I thought it was kind of clever ;)

07 Jan 2005 | scott said...

The content rich inviroment is one of the main Ideas of the web.
How will China stay oppressed when the free flow of ideas really hit.

14 Jan 2005 | headsfromspace said...

What in the world was that?

Actually I think original designs that tickle the senses and the brain are coming online at a furious pace, it's just difficult getting around to see them all.

Yes, blog design in general has steadied design-wise, but innovation is not lacking, as a number of the links above indicate. Personally I maintain a site and a weblog seperately. That's my personal preference. I don't want to constantly update my site, and it's easier to update a blog with the blog tools available.

One of the sites I've always enjoyed is Notes from the Dovecote [though it seems to have disappeared for now]

17 Jan 2005 | Ryan, Web Designer said...

I can only say I really respect blog as a great way to have online discussions. If I decided to develop a personal website, I'd definitely have a blog. I've worked for a web design company for 2 years and I always need fresh information about web design as well as IT in general. And I can say, I found a lot of useful blogs where people share their views with each other for everybody's benefit.