Overview
TrippingWords is a blog styled site housing intellectual opinions on print and web design philosophy by Josh, an academic researcher. This is his first attempt at designing a website which is impressive because it’s a nice design, it’s creative and adheres to a lot of web design principles.
One principle followed is the amount of leading given to paragraphs along with the fact that he used light grey font-colour instead of pure white on black. These choices in design allow for maximum legibility on a dark design.
The Problems
The problem with this site to me is placement and positioning of content. I really feel that a lot of space is wasted on unimportant things. I will attempt to outline and illustrate this.
Exhibit A: Tripping Words
Exhibit A talks a little about what this blog is about. The copy is all well and good but I feel it’s unnecessarily overpowering. After one reads this, they probably don’t care to see it again but it’s always there with this layout. For regular visitors, it would get annoying because it presents nothing fresh.
What most blogs do these days is use content as part of their design element because every time that changes it gives a fresh perspective to the design. It’s not static but dynamic. Look at Abduzeedo where he used typographic elements and imagery in his design. As titles and images constantly changes, his design has a fresh look every time.
Exhibit B: Tripping Words
I liked this bit. It’s graphic, creative, has personality and character, funny and engaging. In my opinion this should have been at the top engaging people because of its qualities rather than Exhibit A. The other reason I prefer this at the top is because it takes much less space that ‘Exhibit A’ so it could have worked nicely at the top.
When you put Exhibit A and B together it does two things for me: it comes across as ramblings to me and it blocks users from relative and important content. It’s a psychological frustration when you make or require people to do things they don’t care to do. Think of a frequent reader who comes every other day to the site… need I say more as to how inconvenient these two blocks of area can become?
Exhibit C: Tripping Words
And now there’s Exhibit C which is visually appealing to the eye. I spent some time looking at it and asked myself, ‘what’s the purpose of this?’ I couldn’t find any so once again to me it comes across as ramblings. The worst part about this is that it’s in one of the most prominent locations in the layout.
Design is not about being pretty. It’s about form and function. Neither comes before the other so you cannot aim to make something visually pleasing but lack in functionality or vice versa. They must and should be equal. For example, the iPod dominated the mp3 player market because it mastered both form and function.
Another issue this area possibly presents is that it shows the logo in two different formats thus taking away from the branding. Choose one, stick with it because consistency is the key in developing a strong brand.
If you move Exhibit C will anyone miss it? Probably not. Point is, you don’t have to move it, just make it functional.
Exhibit D: Tripping Words
Exhibit D illustrates the same issue of content blocking. This huge banner does not necessarily communicate ‘headline’; it’s really the copy that does that. What then is the purpose of the imagery?
Since the layout of the blog shows one full post at a time the ‘Headline’ (Recent Posts’) is incredibly important because it’s essentially a form of navigation. However, this banner pushes the navigation further down the page. This placement communicates this bit of information as unimportant. If someone perceives it as that, they won’t read it and that reaction affects usability. Why? Because the content that can help them cannot be found because they didn’t bother to read it.
Navigation should always be clear and easy to use.
In Closing
Visually it’s a nice design and functional on many fronts. Obviously others find it appealing since it’s featured in many design galleries. However, when you start to break it down it comes down to simplicity being the one thing that it lacks. However from a content perspective, there are some interesting articles here and I think for that reason we can all overlook the little flaws.
What are your thoughts? Feel free to agree, disagree or add your own points but either way, I’d love to hear from you.
