Back in March when I read about Ryan Tomayko’s redesign, I had two immediate reactions:
Of course, at the time I was busy working on a book and so couldn’t really spare much effort for doing redesign work. Once that was in its final stages, though, I sat down and started thinking about what I could do to reduce the amount of cruft hanging around my weblog. Many revisions later, I have something I’m close to being happy with; of course, I don’t think it’ll ever be perfect or finished (I’ve been tweaking bits off and on this evening, and plan to do so for quite some time to come), but at least I’ve got something I’m not totally embarrassed to throw out in public.
Since it’s a bit of a radical departure from what I’ve done previously, and from established norms for weblogs, let me take a moment to explain how I ended up here.
In any sort of discussion of minimal or minimalistic design a certain quote, attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry, is inevitably bandied about:
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
At first this seems like a brilliant insight into the heart of the design process, but it really turns out to be bullshit. because the point at which there is nothing left to take away is the point at which there is nothing left, period. For example, I’m working in HTML 4.01 Strict here (more on that in a later article). Here’s a valid HTML 4.01 Strict document from which nothing can be taken away:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"> <title></title> <p>
Remove the DOCTYPE and you no longer have any assurance that it’s HTML 4.01 Strict (in fact, relying only on a PUBLIC identifier is a bit risky from a legacy-SGML perspective). Remove the title element or the lone p element, and the document is no longer valid. Everything else in HTML 4.01 Strict is optional and so can be taken away. Of course, I could take away the requirement of valid HTML, but at that point I’d probably just declare that the Web which can be expressed in angle brackets is not the true Web (it isn’t, by the way), renounce my worldly possessions and move into a Taoist monastery.
I mention this not because it’s any sort of earth-shattering revelation, but simply because it’s important to recognize that minimalism for minimalism’s sake is just dumb. Like any other design tool, it should be a means to an end.
The thing that’s useful about reaching the point of absolute minimalism, then, is not that it’s the point at which you’ve achieved perfection, or even anything resembling your end goal. Rather, it’s the point at which you realize which of the things you’ve removed were actually important, because their absence brings them into stark focus.
And I ended up focusing maniacally on one thing.
The big take-away from Ryan’s redesign, for me, was a much stronger focus on content, and a de-emphasizing or removal of anything that wasn’t content. This meant a lot of traditional design elements, such as a header/logo, sidebars, etc. immediately went out the window in favor of a simple, single-column layout. There’s no logo, no header and no sidebar. A paragraph’s worth of metadata which used to be present in the sidebar of every page has disappeared, replaced with a much smaller interstitial line of metadata which now (in the absence of dedicated elements in the page for this purpose) does double duty as an aid to navigation.
The primary goal I had in mind as I was working on the redesign was simple: put content in front of people’s eyeballs. This is somewhat tricky because in order to be useful a blog site needs to have a variety of pages which aren’t, strictly speaking, content: archives and topical indexes, for example. Rather than being content, these pages are ways to reach content, and so they should be designed so that you’ll leave them as quickly as possible. This means that all such pages are extremely heavy on direct links to “content pages” and suggest ways to quickly navigate to things you might want to find. In general, I’ve tried to ensure that each “non-content” page (and many “content” pages, as well) supports the following navigational directions: “up”, “down”, “back”, “forward”, “fast forward”.
To take an example, have a look at the archive of entries published in April of this year. All of these navigational directions are present:
All except the “down” and “fast forward” links are also exposed through appropriately-marked link elements in the head of the page. I don’t know of a lot of tools which actually support browsing with those, but if you have one and you use it, the links are there for you (I’ve always snuck a variety of stuff into link elements, though, so it’s not really a new feature).
Additionally, once you reach the “top” of a given area of the site (e.g., the archive of latest entries), the first interstitial switches to suggesting alternate areas you might be interested in, such as topical browsing by category (which you can also reach from any individual entry’s page) or browsing through links.
And, taking a cue from Maura, I’ve also been adding meta tags with noindex,follow declarations on archive pages; hopefully this will weed out any irrelevant search results which would send people to those pages, and help drive people directly to content pages instead.
All of this goes toward the goal of getting you off these “non-content” pages as quickly as possible.
The primary exceptions to this navigation scheme are things that aren’t entries or links, like the “about” page. They don’t form any linked or hierarchical structure, so the interstitials on those pages simply suggest some related pages or places you might want to go, and will often land you in an area with richer navigation patterns.
Of course, this content focus ended up posing a challenge: without relying on non-content-based design elements, how do you differentiate logical areas of a page or types of content?
With one exception (single-pixel horizontal lines which act as dividers in certain contexts; I feel a bit bad about giving in on those, but I’m not quite that hardcore yet), I’ve decided to solve this entirely with typography; while this isn’t and shouldn’t be news, you can do quite a lot using nothing more than simple typographic effects. For example, many people set off blockquotes by adding background colors, borders or large quotation-mark images; instead, I’ve just added a bit of margin, and changed the font from Helvetica to italic Georgia.
While I was doing the design work, I spent a lot of time curled up with Richard Rutter’s adaptation for the Web of Robert Bringhurst’s classic The Elements of Typographic Style, and ended up implementing a lot of its recommendations. All of the typography is set to a baseline grid (with measured intervals, and with implementation helped by useful pointers from Wilson’s ALA article on the subject), and variations in margins as well as font face, size, style and weight implement practically every design element you’ll see here.
Along the way, I also bumped up the base font sizes everywhere; the switch to a single-column layout meant that the line lengths for smaller sizes were getting uncomfortable, so a minor tweak (and a corresponding increase in leading) was needed. It may just be me, but the baseline size (14px with a total line-height of 22px) is quite wonderfully readable.
If you’re interested, dig into the CSS and you’ll find a lot of really pedantic stuff that only a typophile could love (and which more accomplished typophiles, which is to say most all of them, could no doubt have done a better job of).
All of this leads into what has already been the most adventurous and controversial change: the lack of a ubiquitous “home page” link. At first, I tried to find a way to work it in — for example, in the upper interstitial spot which holds other navigation elements — but it always seemed out of place and I ultimately couldn’t find anywhere to put it that reliably worked on every type of page. And that got me thinking a bit.
There are three primary functions a home page typically serves:
Now, the first function here — landing page — is largely irrelevant for this site; the overwhelming majority of people coming here end up landing directly on a content page, because they’re almost always coming from a direct link or a search engine.
The third function — advertising new content — is also irrelevant, because feeds do a far better job of that. If you’re still dropping by the home page regularly in search of new content, stop already and get yourself a feed reader (or hit the Django community aggregator instead, since it’s much more active and opens up a much wider range of content).
Which leaves only the second function: home page as navigational gateway. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been trying as hard as possible to set up navigational options to keep you off “non-content” pages, and deliberately adding such a page to the various navigational chains (which — I hope — do a better job of helping you get around) didn’t seem to make much sense. Plus there’s already a page which logically should be linked from everywhere — the “about” page — which can logically serve as a jumping-off point to any other part of the site.
So I stopped worrying about where to put a “home page” link, and just left it out. I also spent as much time as possible minimizing the amount of non-content information on the home page, eventually trimming it down to a single line of text at the top. I wouldn’t recommend trying this anywhere else, but for this site and its traffic and usage patterns, I think I like it.
Plus, it’s sort of a neat experiment to see how much a home page is actually used versus how often it’s simply a bit of cruft that people look for but don’t get any practical value out of.
Of course, the redesign is still very much a work in progress; there are a number of things I’m still tweaking and refining, and I’ll be paying attention to comments and stats to get an idea of how well the changes are working. If you’ve got an opinion or if you’ve spotted a problem, type it into the comment box and let me know.
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“Plus, it’s sort of a neat experiment to see how much a home page is actually used versus how often it’s simply a bit of cruft that people look for but don’t get any practical value out of. ”
I did the same thing visually a few months ago. I left in the home page link and a sidebar (in my culture, there’s a history of writing things in sidebars). What I did get rid of are previous and next links on the site; there’s no casual relationship between entries that justifies them. I rarely use them on other people’s sites, but I use home links.
We should start taking basic typography to aggregators. The bulk of my reading is done via those readers and not people’s sites.
Actually, I feel more the lack of a search function (or a fast way to look in archives) more than the lack of a homepage. For example, it’s very difficult from an entry to find your article about django user registration (unless you leave the entry for a while and use google).
Apart from this, I love minimal stuff and the typography choices are excellent.
I must say, although I do like your typography decisions, I think the lack of a homepage link is a bad choice.
I’m a pretty savvy reader online, but I’ve always been a person to read a website’s content on its actual, physical site. I’ve tried and tried again with numerous RSS aggregators— and, even when I did use them, I used them merely as sort of update pings, informing me when I should go to the site to read the newest entry. It was nice to see the pictures in correct places, the content in the way the author originally wanted.
This isn’t to say that I don’t think RSS should be included— I always do and I think that if you can, you should.
However, now that I’m on your page, I’m trying to see what other things you’ve written. Of course, my first move is to try and find your home page. Instinctively, I go to the top, try to click, and I fail. Normally, I would just leave the site— I am (and many others, I’m sure are) too lazy (sadly enough) to just edit the URL and go to your home page through the address bar.
So, in somewhat of a conclusion, I think that having a lack of a link to your home page is both 1) not helpful for those who view your site outside of RSS, and 2) not helpful for those who are new to your site and have been linked into a specific article, wanting to see others.
Brian
First of all, I really like the new design. It’s pleasent to read larger quantities of text, which is almost never the case with text on a screen.
I do have to object somewhat to the top links on these individual posts. There’s no links to archives, which I find annoying if you’re looking for an older post on with a related subject (which might not be in the same category).
Also, suffering from NADD, I love to visit the landing pages of interesting sites, simply to check that I have visited all the pages in search of information. It’s not important per se, but as a creature of habit it breaks my flow when clicking around.
I am sorry but IMO your old design is better. Minimal should not weaken usability.
This is mis-quoted. The actual quotation is:
Which translates better as:
[Note: edited because you comment system won’t let me properly quote you.]
I think you may be missing the point. Implicit in this maxim is the requirement for unaltered utility. If you can take something away from a design without effecting it’s utility, you should do.
Bill: I like the idea of typography-aware aggregators :) I do use next/previous links all the time, though, so I kept them as one navigation option.
Guiliani: I’m deliberately holding off until someone writes a generic search system for Django that doesn’t suck.
Brian: you can find all the other things I’ve written. In fact, they’re just as many clicks away as they’d be if there was a “home page” link (e.g., two clicks to get to latest entries). Once again, I’m wondering how much of the “utility” of a home page link really comes from the thing itself, and how much is ingrained habit of “I must find the home page link”.
Christian: there is indeed a link to an archive. It just goes “up” one level to an archive for the day. From there you can keep going “up” or you can jump straight to the latest entries. You can also go straight into topical archives, and I tend to be a bit obsessive about ensuring things are categorized appropriately.
Kevin: perhaps you’d like to elaborate with specific criticisms?
Noah: I read French pretty well and I’ve seen the quote in the original, but the only difference between that and the usual English translations is that the original French version is expressed in the subjunctive mood. It still says nothing whatsoever about preserving utility, and still treats the point of minimalism as the end rather than as a point from which the designer can reflect on what’s actually important.
I don’t agree with your lack of linking to the home page :)
If you don’t link to it, why have one?
Eoin: to get people off the home page and onto a content page as quickly as possible, and because they’d complain if it came up as a 404.
Thanks for the explanation about the home page. I went back and looked at my analytics, and found stark evidence of what you’re describing. In nearly a year of using Google Analytics, my home page was hit over 4000 times from 93 different sources, but not a single one was a link from my own site. If that’s not proof that links to the home page are irrelevant (at least for guys like us), I don’t know what is.
I’ve always disliked all the cruft on most blogs, to the point where I don’t even like having a title. I suppose it’s time to really investigate my analytics archives in more detail to see what’s reasonable to get rid of. Like you and your horizontal lines though, I don’t know if I can part with my “g” icon (or one of its variants). I know it’s completely irrelevant, but I like it anyway. Besides, one potential problem with minimalism is that it tends to make sites to look fairly similar. I’ll need to differentiate myself somehow. :)
Why not just have it redirect to the latest content?
I’ve had the same reactions as you reading Tomako’s article : I like it and I want to try it. And you’ve done a great job :)
However, just like when I landed Tomako’s article, I had another reaction : “where am I ?” This is, I think, the very first and perhaps most important question one asks oneself when landing somewhere.
This sort of sums up my initial reaction :
“Ok I’m on a site called Minimal. No, wait. That must be the title of the article. So what site am I on ? The article has been written by James Bennet. Ok, I’m guessing that I’m on James Bennet’s weblog. Let’s see, b-list.org starts with a B, I guess that fits. Why is the name of the website underneath the name of the article ? And where’s the link to the home page ?”
Usability is about dealing with what users expect. Every question a newcomer has to ask adds frustration.
For those keeping score, I realized that Google Analytics had been hiding internal links from me, so I’m not sure how many links there were to my home page.
I find the width of the text just a bit too long. Longer than a book and much longer than a magazine or a newspaper. My eye wants to jump down about 2/3 of the way across. It’s very tiring, and I admit I just can’t read it for very long.
There is also too much vertical space between paragraphs. Printed matter doesn’t do that. Very uncomfortable to make that large of a jump.
I love the idea. It’s the execution that I hate.
Reading the comments now, I notice they they are about the correct width for comfortable reading.
I too went looking for the home page link while reading the article. Sure there’s the feed for the latest articles, but having arrived from outside to a particular page, I want to see what you’ve recently written before deciding to subscribe.
If there is no link to the home page, why include links to categories? If I enjoyed the article I can only read other categorized articles by the author, but not recent or non-related articles that I would find on a home page? This is a very silly site design.
To help you get directly to other content without forcing an irrelevant intermediary page into the navigation chain.
Click the date of the article, and there you are on an archive page which shows other entries around the same time, and which has jumping-off points to other archives.
I encourage you to pick up a copy of Robert Bringhurst’s book and read what he has to say on vertical motion (page 37 of version 3.1). Rutter’s understanding of Bringhurst’s ideas here are unfortunately mistaken and have left him to offer bad advice here.
The goal of Bringhurst’s suggestions is to ensure that (a) pages of prose are exactly the same height, (b) when text is printed on both sides of a page, the baselines of all lines should line up to improve readability, (c) facing pages and multiple columns on the same page are lined up correctly on the same baselines. None of those concerns apply to web pages except when printed, and if we try to follow those concepts you will often end up with inappropriately large vertical gaps in our text. That seems to be exactly what has happened here on your site.
I support your idea of removing the home page link but you need to improve and simply the navigation in order for it to be effective.
I would like to here more about why you chose such large sizes for your headings and the title, and why you chose to align everything on the left.
I was completely lost when I got to the page. After a lot of frustrating poking around, I realized that I want to be able to get to “entries” in one step. I’d kill the comments stuff in the interstitial and give a link to entries there.
Who looks at the top for info about comments (except for you, the blog author)?
“Nothing left to take away” does not mean “nothing left.” Your calling that quote “bullshit” indicates that you don’t understand it, or that you’re pretending to not understand it as a rhetorical device.
It’s almost a philanthropic position, this of publishing without a homepage. It’s akin to saying: “here are my contributions to the great encyclopedia that is the Web; let It do with them as It will.”
I make a lot of sites whose design could “benefit” from this wisdom. After working whatever number of days or weeks to perfect the details of the detail pages, I’m often left wondering: “okay, now what goes on the homepage”, and infrequently get anywhere further than a few lists of regurgitated, yet truncated content.
So I think it’s a noble experiment, these Headless Homepages.
Yet I’m not alone in being uncomfortable with the whole thing. It’s almost physically repulsive to not easily find a homepage link to center myself navigationally. It’s the Star or Arrow or Bang on the map saying “You are Here.” It’s the ability to restart your computer. I’m done with whatever; now let me start over and do something different.
I think, for those who already know about your blog, (and if not too presumptuous to say, your design philosophy), this will be a tolerable change. But I may also suggest it’s a barrier-to-entry for all the others. You proffer RSS as the de facto way to identify new content, but for those not already subscribed it’s an uncompromisingly large amount of overhead. Most RSS users don’t just add feeds willy nilly, but with a particular discretion reserved for few other things. I sometimes add feeds on a trial basis, but I will almost never add a feed without first clicking the familiar homepage link, scouting the latest content, and deciphering the identity-at-large first.
Homepages, for worse, are really all about identity. I’d argue that identity is content, just a different species than blog posts (I’d also argue that archive lists are content, as well, just of the “Table of Contents” variety — they have a job, please just let them). Further, I’d say the lack of homepage is an identity, somewhere near “anonymous donor”.
Here are a few observations of your new design. In particular, I’ve noted some differences in my experience of your new design and the cited inspiration.
Clicking the link “Ryan Tomayko’s redesign” puts me at an article page where the author’s name is on its own line. That name is linked to a list of recent items that fairly prominently features the author’s name. On your site your name is stuck inside a line of other information (the “interstitial”). There is also a link there to a list of recent entries but that page does not have your name on it at all except down at the bottom.
I’m currently subscribed to your feed (and therefore already a bit familiar with your website) so I can’t be sure how that bit of missing information on your archive pages would affect me.
For some reason, I find the various kinds of information included in the line below the title very difficult to break apart; it seems to run together. I’m uncertain if that is only because my eyesight isn’t particularly good, or something else. I do know that article text is a great deal easier for me to read than the interstitial text.
Going back to a comparison to Tomayko’s site, there is less detail at the top of his page but he also breaks the different kinds of information up by putting them on separate lines.
I think you misunderstand the quote and I think you misunderstand what minimalism is. The quote isn’t about removing things until there is nothing left, and minimalism isn’t about the absence of everything.
From Wikipedia:
Just like the original quote, the idea is not to remove everything, but to remove anything unnecessary.
I prefer the old design. The usability was much better IMO.
Noah, you’re posting like I insulted your sister’s honor or something, dude. Ease off a bit, because the quote says not one single thing about maintaining utility or functionality or essence. It says “nothing to take away”, not “nothing left which can be removed without harming the essence of the design”, and that’s bullshit, as I’ve said.
I would appreciate it if you left my sister, and her honour, out of this! ;)
I realise the quote is not explicit about what to remove or how much of it to remove, but it is usually used as and I believe the intended meaning was similar to the minimalist (even though this movement came much later) idea of reducing something down to it’s bare essentials, to the point where if you removed anything else you would no longer be able to call it what you had called if before.
My only point was that your literal reading of Antoine de Saint Exupéry is misleading.
James, a bunch of comments:
1 column is fine by me. However, your column is simply too wide. Or to be precise, there are too many words in one line. Reducing the line width to 70% of its current size would make it easier to read your posts.
Mixing links and posts on the main page is a bit confusing for people not used to the site. I think you should find a better way very quickly distinguish between the two types of content. A different font color - perhaps?
It’s absolutely silly to leave off a home page. You have totally misunderstood why people look at the homepage. It’s called frontpage for a reason - it’s what you show people when they first visit your site. I see it as your initial presentation. So after reading your entry, I click on the home page link so that I will see what else you think is important. I am interested in seeing what items you believe are important.
It’s wrong to not have a ‘start’, ‘home’ or ‘front’ page. A big part of good usability is not to frustrate people - well, you found the easiest way to do so.
I like what you did to the site. I am so used to seeing all of these shiny little buttons and blurbs all over that I forget why I am there in the first place.
Regarding
linkelements in header :For information, Opera is one of them, and it’s a pretty neat feature, which should be exposed on more websites and more browsers IMHO.
The Antoine de Saint Exupéry quote have to be read in context:
I think your redesign is refreshing and exciting (I would say inspiring, but I haven’t done anything about it yet). Abandoning the ‘ubiquitous “home page” link’ is a particularly incisive stroke. Of course, everyone will have their quibbles: for example, I prefer pink.
The thing about the de Saint Exupéry quote (and the fuller quote does this even more clearly) is that it exposes the essentially conservative, reactionary and nit-picking nature of minimalism generally. The de Saint Exupéry quote is bullshit because minimalism is bullshit.
When I look at your (and Ryan’s) new designs I don’t hear some tedious dirge by Philip Glass or Steve Reich, I hear the freshness and clarity of Haydn.
This design is clean and works. Well done.
I really like the idea of being as simple as possible and to take things away until “there is no longer anything to take away”. But what i really miss is the obligatory header. I know it’s a design element, but whats the matter with just a ~24px height image or just a h1 tag to indicate that you are on the b-list?
If more and more webdesigners get used to the idea of Ryan Tomayko’s redesign, many pages will look quite the same (because there is nothing your page could be different in). Websites should have at least one element which seperates them from the rest of the net. I would like to relate your important content from the athor’s people (stupid) content with just one view.
you didn’t remove the “home” link, you just renamed it to James Bennet.
That’s an interesting article about that describes the current state of things.
I personally rarely browse someone’s site. I generally rely on feeds, reddit, digg, delicious to find content. I rely more on peer review of content than serendipitous browsing.
I completely agree with minimalism, but you’re site needs some personality. Maybe a header graphic or something, oh, and make the font Arial 10.
E.
It took me a while to find the right words for this discussion. Actually I needed to read your post after the one from Ryan, to think about it in a more clear way.(So thanks for the great post and all the great comments).
I think its always about “What ways do I want to offer ‘my users’ to find what they are looking for?”
So I personally know a lot of people that won’t find anything else then the landingpage, even if they were looking for it. They are searching for a “sidebar” an a “homepage link”, whithout those they are handicapped. They are just overstrained with the thought that the content itself is navigable. (Sure, they will also be overstrained with most of the content here. ;) )
But for me, this is a clear result of thinking about this subject, that it is also about giving poeple the freedom to navigate the way they like, or about to exclude people just for the cause of minimalism.
By the way: IMO, neither fanatism nor extremism have brought anything good to the world.
Greetings from Germany,
keep on writing!
Thanks for the inspiration of a simplified theme, I’ve just implemented my own interpretation of simple on my own site.
Thanks!
How do i get to old entries?
I read Ryan’s article on this originally - I can understand where he’s coming from, but I think eschewing all navigational tools & conventions doesn’t always work in practice. Even if the ideas behind it are noble. His execution of it has worked a little better than yours, James - I feel that your front page comes across as a little too cluttered when trying to find an article you were reading last week.
Leading on from this, I re-designed my own blog somewhat - I’ve always been minimalist with my layouts, but I feel that keeping navigational tools & titles are still important. In a book you have an index, a diary your date markers. On a website, you need something comparable - the mediums are different, but a reader still needs his or her bearings.
A point of contention: having re-introduced visual ‘borders’ back into my layout, I honestly feel that readability has improved as a result. Sometimes the text itself doesn’t perform this well enough. You might find this article on visible borders in design a worthwhile read.
you should have gotten rid of the comments as well. or at least hide them behind a link right here.
putting comments right below the article makes the article worse.