Cogs can think.

As you all know, I’m quite the fan of Dooce and her weblog. There are only a few weblogs I read consistently, but hers is definitely one of them. Interesting sense of humour, coupled with a good sense of relativity, leads to a really interesting weblog to read. But enough with the ass kissing - I want to kiss my own ass today.

Heather also has a small link section in her left column, and yesterday she led me to this website, design*sponge. Dooce is quite positive on this website’s new design, but I really beg to differ. It surely looks good and impressive - lots of interesting colours and tidbits. However - try using it. Then I get stuck. There’s just so much “stuff” in there, it makes my head spin. Backgrounds, labels, patterns, contrasting colours, transparency; you name it, it’s there. But because of all that, I simply lose oversight. I lose focus.

Now, back to the ass kissing - my own ass, this time. When I set out to work on Cogs Can Think. v3 (you’re looking at it) I only had a faint goal in the back of my head on how I wanted it to turn out: clean, elegant, and content-focused. Starting with the classic Kubrick design, I slowly but surely added more of my own elements to this site. What I’m left with now is round and about exactly the way I want my blog to look like.

I don’t like backgrounds, patterns, overly enthousiastic use of ten billion million different colours, transparency, and so on. I want cleanliness. So, the only way the elements here are distinguished, is by abusing fonts. More specifically, by abusing one font, as all text on Cogs Can Think. is Trebuchet MS. I play with point sizes to distinguish the items’ importance - the side column is a small font, the content of the blog is a normal font, while the headers are slightly bigger. I don’t use separating lines, different backgrounds and patterns, or more of that stuff.

Colourwise, I’m easy too. I don’t bombard my users with colours - I give them white, grey, black, and a brownish-orange. This last colour, what I refer to as ‘the link colour’, is always derived from my blog’s header image (masthead in Dooce terms). When the header image changes, my link colour will adapt. Consistency über alles.

I did not build Cogs Can Think. in one day - it’s an ever continuing process of small changes, minor colour changes, font size tweaks, and so on, with or without the help of other people (Eugenia or Adam). I’m actually quite proud of the outcome, and at least a small group of people seem to agree with me (I actually have a hand full of dedicated readers, for whatever reason).

Heather’s weblog appears to be very similar to mine in design (the other way around, actually); simplicity, elegance, cleanliness. The focus is on the content, there’s no avalanche of colours, patterns, or backgrounds. I really, really like the design. I have no idea if all this is on purpose, or that it’s a sort of accidental outcome of her own tweaking process.

Anyway, Heather has been dropping hints lately that she’s working on adding features to her weblog, and of course it makes sense to couple that with a redesign. I’m just really hoping she keeps that same simplicity/elegance/cleanliness combination, and that she isn’t enticed, because of design*sponge, to go all wild with colours and fluff that only serve as distractors from the actual stuff that matters - the content.

And let’s face it, Dooce.com doesn’t need all that fluff. Her content doesn’t need it. For all I care, she just dumps a .txt file on the net.