Critique #3: Design*Sponge
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.
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.
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