Critique #2: Smashing Magazine
My second critique is the well-known Smashing Magazine (http://smashingmagazine.com/). It’s a blog targeted at designers and brings resources such as news, tutorials, tips and tricks, interesting designs, inspiration, resources and much more.
The design itself is extremely clean, with no textures used at all. It’s a two-column layout with a wider-than-usual sidebar on the right, which is host to an extremely visible RSS icon, as well as a number of subscribers to show their influence. Below that, there’s a search box, followed by what I think is way too many sponsorship ads. The typography is well done, using sans-serif fonts exclusively and adequate line height to promote easy readability.
There’s a twitter link at the bottom of the sidebar with no live feed, so social networking isn’t a real goal for Smashing Magazine, which makes sense since their goal is not to gain prominence in the world since: a) they’re already quite well-known and b) they are not trying to promote themselves for the sake of employment etc. Thus, the only social aspect of the site is by comments and the forum. The comments are useless most of the time, with quite a few posts just being spam. However, the forum seems to be well-moderated and active, providing a space where designers can communicate.
The colour scheme predominately focuses on orange/red hues, which are pleasing and effectively as highlight colours.
Critique #1: drnicwilliams.com
My first blog critique is on http://drnicwilliams.com/, which is my boss’ blog. It is a blog focused on web technologies, frameworks and methodologies, so it’s aimed at the developers rather than the designers.
The blog’s main focus is to promote the author’s technical capability and influence on the Ruby on Rails community, with test-driven development methodologies as a secondary objective. The blog is very plain as it is a minor modification of a basic theme, hence it’s not very personalised or unique. It is currently not being updated frequently (last update was over a month ago), but each blog post tends to have quite a bit of content and preparation behind it.
The layout is a standard two column layout, with the sidebar on the right, which contains a short author bio at the top, an RSS link with a counter of the number of subscribed readers. He is well-established in the target community already, and he has a Twitter feed in the sidebar to allow easy social networking. The tone is informal which is probably the only personality the blog has. It’s simple, efficient, easy to find and read previous blogs. It is very bland, however, but most of the readership does not care.
Tutorial 4: HTML/CSS Exercise
It works fine in Safari and Firefox, and I’m doubtful it works in IE due to CSS3 selectors.
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