My third and final critique is Design*Sponge (http://www.designspongeonline.com/). Design*Sponge is another design blog, although the tone is more informal and personal than Smashing Magazine.
The design is extremely arty and uses a great deal of textures, which is a stark contrast compared to Smashing Magazine. It is a three column fixed-width centred layout with a thin navigation bar on the left, and the search, RSS, Twitter and advertisements down the side. Elements like frayed edges of cloth, coloured paper, lace/frills, ribbons and translucent tape make up the majority of the design. As a result, serif fonts were used to keep in with the arty style. Given that the blog has plenty of DIY home art projects and focuses more on physical crafts and the such, this design works very well.
The only social aspect of the site is comments, and there seems to be a good quality of comments on most blog posts. There is a Twitter linked down the side, but there was no tweets embedded into the webpage, which means that users have to actually click on the link and then determine if it’s worth following from that, which takes more effort and hence users are less likely to do so.
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