(via Lukas Mathis.)

While the magazine is not something you can pick up in a store, Google is saying that it intends to publish all of the articles from the magazine on the Think Quarterly website and you can download PDF and EPUB copies of the first issue that you can then read on your iOS/Android tablets.

The thing that’s interesting about Think Quarterly to my mind is that, for a company that is roundly regarded as not having much taste when it comes to design, the magazine looks fantastic.¹ The layout is clean but with touches of visual flair here and there that encourage you to continue reading and, perhaps more importantly, assist in understanding the material.

All of which makes the website pretty disappointing. To be clear, the site is not ugly. And it’s not obviously a Google site. Definitely, it has style. No, the problem with the website is the way that the articles are displayed. Which is to say that you are able to read them and… that’s about it. Compare the lead story — an interview with Guy Laurence, the CEO of Vodafone UK — as it’s presented in the magazine with how it’s presented on the website.

Again, it’s not that the presentation is horrible. It’s just that it has no oomph. There is none of the flair that accompanies the article as it’s presented in the magazine. What’s more, while you might at first think that the layout really isn’t that bad, when it’s repeated for article after article after article, it begins to get a little stale. More to the point, it evidences a complete lack of imagination for the design of the site. Kudos to Google for putting well-written content up there to be sure, but it’s a sad reflection on where we are with web design that this would be considered a pretty good magazine website.

It’s tempting to say that one shouldn’t be surprised that Google has not put the same amount of attention to detail into the website as it has to the magazine (particularly when it has no financial incentive to do so). This is fine if Think Quarterly were the only publication afflicted with this problem. Unfortunately, it’s not. See here, here, here, here, here, here and here (and so it doesn’t look like I’m just picking on magazines: here, here, here, here and here). This isn’t a case of Think Quarterly’s designers lacking imagination. It’s a case of web designers in general lacking imagination. It’s a fundamental inability, more than 20 years after the web first started and over a decade since the Internet went mainstream, to create layouts and designs that match the quality of those in print.

I am not a hater. There is great work being done — some of it by Google, some of it by people who are not magazines and some of it by magazines that only exist on the web. It’s 2011. We can stop being the poor cousin. We just need to release our imaginations.²

After the discussion in a previous blog post, I tried to create an alternative to the current New York Times Opinion page that dealt with the issues I had. (The image was mocked up very quickly and I didn’t bother properly lining things up, so apologies there.)

Linklines

I’ve dispensed with the headlines as I think they’re part of the issue for me and have replaced them with what I’m calling ‘linklines’.

In a print newspaper, headlines serve no purpose other than to draw attention to the article. For opinion pieces, they are not intended to summarise the article but rather to give a flavour for the article. In print, this is fine because if I want to scan the article to see if I want to read it, I can: the article is right there.

On the web, though, I think headlines need to be replaced with something else when they’re functioning as links. Enter the linkline. The headlines have been replaced with these linklines and I find the result much more helpful in determining whether I want to continue reading.

Snippets

A good linkline makes a snippet irrelevant and they’ve been omitted completely.

Site Maps

Site maps are typically ignored by web designers when designing a page. If they are included, they’re put in a ghetto of their own — away from everything else useful. I believe site maps are incredibly important for assisting a reader in understanding context. In the comments, this came up as one of the problems I might be having.

To again compare with print, a ‘site map’ is typically unnecessary on each page for a few reasons:

1. If the work is long enough to require a site map (read: table of contents), it is easily accessible with one or two jumps from any position in the work. These jumps can be conducted almost instantly. This is not the case when a website where a user must search for the page where the site map has been dumped.
2. It is always clear from the physical object where you are in the work. The physical properties provide ‘context’ for the reader. These properties are completely absent from websites and contribute to the disorientation that a reader may experience.

Accordingly, a site map has been inserted into the footer of the page.

So, what do you think? Does it make a difference for you?

I’m typing this while writing in a room that looks like a bomb hit it so allow me to be more specific.

I hate information clutter. Really hate isn’t the right word because it’s not like I get worked up about it.¹ I mean hate in the sense of can’t stand it and can’t stand it in the sense of I don’t want to be around this so I’m going to leave. The way that you might not be able to stand the smell of something.

But I’m starting to think that I must be crazy because it doesn’t seem to matter how much more advanced websites get, they don’t change in this respect. HTML5 replaces Flash but it doesn’t stop pages that are three or four scrolls deep. CSS3 allows us to throw around rounded boxes with gay abandon but it doesn’t result in fewer rounded boxes.

I tend to believe in the idea that if you’re the only person that has a problem, maybe you’re the problem. So I’m thinking this must mean that I’m a crazy person. I’m writing this partly as an admission of defeat and partly as a cry into the wilderness. Are there any other crazy people out there?

For those of you for whom what I’m saying isn’t immediately making sense, allow me to illustrate with an example. I love the New York Times; it’s a great newspaper and I feel privileged that I can read it each day for nothing on its website. Yesterday, the Times launched a new look to the Opinion section of its website. (You can see it here.) John Gruber praised it as being a ‘nice layout’ and from what I’ve seen most people think it’s pretty spiffy.

I hate it.²

And I hate it because of information clutter. I hate it because I can hit the Page Down key four times before I get to the bottom of the page.

To be clear, I love long form writing and long form journalism in particular. I have created a website whose entire purpose is to allow me to read long form journalism more enjoyably. Let no man read this and think that I wish the columnists would simply use fewer words. No, what I’m getting at are long front or splash pages. Pages that welcome you upon arrival to a website or section. And which just go on forever. Like turtles, it’s content all the way down.

We’re not talking about four pages of endless scrolling that is filled with a site map or something. This is four pages of content. At the time of writing, if you hit the Page Down key four times you will make it to the bottom of the front page and you will be presented with a teaser to an article by Jeff McMahan about carnivores. This is a real article. If you click on it, you are taken to an article that is 2,789 words long.

But this is my question: who is clicking on this? Who is hitting Page Down four times, getting to the bottom and then clicking on this link?³ I can’t believe anyone is. And yet these endless front pages are pervasive. And on really, really popular websites. See Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN, YouTube, AOL.

When I go to a site like this, even when it’s a site filled with content that I like, I invariably find myself shutting it. I can’t deal with the information overload and I’d rather not look at it. This cannot be the case for most people, though. If it were, these websites would change. They’re big and successful and popular because people visit them (not because people close them).

But it just doesn’t make any sense. Gahhhh!

Take the Amazon page. I’m looking at it now and if I hit the Page Down key three times, I am presented with ‘Bounce’ fabric softener. Who the fuck clicks on this? Who looks at the first row of products, the second row, the third row — indeed six rows — and then thinks to themselves, Ah ha! Fabric softener! At last!⁴

According to Wikipedia, Amazon made $24.5 billion. In 2009. Last year, I did not make even one billion dollars. Clearly what they are doing is working. Which is why I’m thinking I must be crazy. I must have the problem. I must be the odd one out.

Excuse me while I sit in a corner muttering to myself.

Are you kidding me?

It’s time to ditch Hemingway. The theme has served me well and it was hard to let it go after all the work I’d put in to adjusting it but I need to move on.

Hemingway’s been a good example to me of the power of design. While this is ostensibly my blog and I can do whatever I want with it, I’m startled by how eventually blogging became all but impossible over the past few months. Undoubtedly a lot of that had to do with my schedule: I moved back to Australia, began work at a law firm and helped to organise an anime convention. But that doesn’t explain it all. Some — I’m not sure how much — was the result of this blog’s previous design.

The structure of the Hemingway design with the way it ‘featured’ posts on the front page always made me feel whatever I wrote had to achieve a certain level of significance to justify that placement. Anything short, pithy, or just not that memorable was better off being put somewhere else.

At first I thought this was good. It would prevent me from writing frivolous posts (and it gave me something to put on Twitter). What I discovered, however, was that it prevented me from writing anything. The great thing about blogging is the liberating nature of it when compared with other forms of writing. The theme actively worked against that; pushing me to write pieces that were of an epic enough nature to deserve to be there on the front page.

We’ll see how things work out with Old Popular Yolk.