Here are the three that caught my eye (for various reasons):
Overall favorite: Art(h)ist'ry
Most interesting content: A Walk in the Words
Least favorite: Josep Colomer's Weekly Blog
As an History of Art concentrator, it doesn't surprise me that I was immediately drawn to the playful title of Art(h)ist'ry. When I first saw the site, I had a positive reaction to the design aesthetic: clean lines, pale background, colorful images and limited text. I think the idea of the visual might have been more important to this blogger because the content deals with art and design, and thus the audience may expect a certain level of design technique. I thought the images included by the blogger--a PhD candidate at Columbia U.--had great clarity and sizing, which really grabs your attention as your scroll down the page. While the text does seem to be a secondary aspect of the blog, I think that blogs can be successful by just focusing on images. Sometimes, a picture can say a 1000 words...
A Walk in the Words focused on linguistics, as stated in the short description underneath the title. As a result, text, words and letters were all going to be central to this blog. However, the author did put some thought into the blog design. The dark background, sidebar and title-bar all emphasized the white space behind the text. Although my eye was somewhat distracted from the text by the ads and gadgets placed down the right side, the blogger successfully drew her audience's eye to the white space where her content was located. The posts were all very well written and thought-provoking, definitely the product of a true academic. This blog's visuals weren't my favorite, but I think the blogger purposefully used design to draw attention to her "walk in the words."
I hated Josep Colomer's Weekly Blog. Scrolling down the page was equivalent to watching my scatterbrained high school pre-calc teacher scribble non-sensicle letters and symbols all over the whiteboard. I had no focus, no direction, no idea how to navigate the site, nor did I really want to. The plain white background said the author couldn't be bothered with choosing a color. The different font types and sizes said he really didn't care about giving his audience some sense of uniformity or regularity. Visuals aren't important to everyone, but when you create a space to share your academic thoughts and ideas, shouldn't it be presentable? Isn't it supposed to make people want to read your writing?
Our world is so visual that a lack there of really stands out.
Image by Saul Loeb/Pool via Reuters
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28747121/
I am totally with you on Josep Colomer's Weekly Blog. Between the embarrassing lack of content, the erratic font sizes, and boring visuals, I can't picture a blog I'd like to visit less. I also agree that Art(h)ist'ry had striking visuals that had me scrolling through the main page with eagerness. You make a good point that an art-focused blog should draw most of the reader's attention to the visuals, not the text itself.
ReplyDeleteI had a less satisfactory experience with "A Walk in the Words" than you; something about it just left me cold. One post from January 16th, "COLD DAY??" came across as ranting, with no context for what prompted the rant, it was just out of nowhere. Also, the posts didn't have enough of a coherent voice throughout; it seemed random and distant.
Emily- Nice use of screen shots in your last post. And I really like the way you rated the academic blogs in this post. Very straightforward for the reader. Great use of humor too with the picture of the Obamas and the Bidens waving goodbye to the Bushes. Point well taken and made!
ReplyDeleteI do want to take issue with your comment about the art history blog. You said the text seemed to be a secondary aspect of the blog, but the work that the text did in the most recent post, for example, was crucial to our understanding of WHY the blogger had chosen the photos she did and how those images connect to one another in her mind. Perhaps you meant that the text was overwhlemed by the images? And that our visual impression was that the text was secondary? Not sure.
I'm curious how you're thinking about the design of your own blog and why you made the choices you did? What are you going for in terms of tone and style here?
Delia--I did in fact mean that the images seemed to "overwhelm" the text more than act as the primary focus of the blog. The term "overwhelm" seems to have a negative connotation though, and I don't see her choice as negative. Maybe because I am an art history major I understood what the blogger was doing without reading the text? It's possible that if I was coming to this blog with a different background I might have had to rely more on the text.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of my own design principles, I think I'm still figuring out what I want my tone and style to be. I prefer not to have too much going on in terms of color palette, gadgets, applications, etc., so that readers can focus on my writing.
I agree with you about how boring Colomer's blog was, but I also wonder if that is what makes his blog more academic than many of the others. Other than a lack of font and color variation, his choice of dry words, in my opinion, did add to the academic nature of his work. Part of that is my own personal perspective. On numerous occasions when I have written in the sciences I have been to make it abstract, bland, emotionless, and detached because that is the standard convention. And while I cannot say if that is true in the social sciences, Colomer did a pretty good job emulating that writing style.
ReplyDelete