Oh dear, that is a damn ugly site. Why did boxes & arrows spend a better part of a year talking about this redesign and the process that went behind it only to present something that was dull, unprofessional, and generally all over the place? Where is the low-level, detailed care that text is aligned properly?

I suppose you could say that the semantic structure is there, but the CSS to skin the site is about as bland as you can get for a site of this nature and stature. View source to see the results yourself. Its not compartmentalized, its overriden in unnatural ways, and generally is poor.

Any designer would tell you that balance and consistancy are the keys to a good design. Why have a navigation that is scaled all over the place, as if it was a misplaced tag cloud. Its a navigation for god sake. And let us not forget to consider the graphic quality and choices made in this redesign. Are the graphics clean and clear, leading to choices that help drive a metaphor or aid in users finding information or goals…no, not really. What limited graphics that are present on the site to aid in the experience or so poorly choosen and implemented it says very little about the field of IA as a backbone to design.

In a course I teach in web development, I preach to students to begin to study bad interfaces. The practice of studying UI’s that generally do not meet the needs of the user are often telling and allow you to become a more fully featured designer. It allows you to know what mistakes to avoid. The study of bad design requires you to ask tough questions about the their designs, but conversely, your own work:

What doesn�t work?
Why doesn�t it work?
What can be improved and how?

I would suggest another redesign as soon as possible with these questions in mind when approuching the design phase.

Even more sad is the CMS that drives the site, which is so heavly lifting Basecamp, it should be criminal…but thats for another rant.

err.theblog does a wonderful write up as to the power of microformats. While miroformats are seemingly not that big of a deal, its really quite powerful when you think of what they are, which are just formats. The iniate power of any tool comes from its ability to format, or to become meaningful by its very design. Consider an electrical plug and cord. The plug format, I’m sure, was initially designed with wild variations with the only major ability being that it could consume a current. The power of the technology was increased tenfold when a format of plug became omni-present and sockets and plugs had a standardized format in which to accept. Now I can take my plug anywhere, save for europe, and plug it in, safe in the knowledge that I should be getting a charge out of it.

Which brings us to markup. Every developer and their child for the past 20 years has written wildy different markup based off of, at times, ever evolving markup standards“. Microformats are here to clean up our mess and make real meaning of our markup. With meaning comes the ability to supply a wider range of possibilities and power…. which is … wait for it … the very nature of the sematic web! Markup with meaning provides powerful advantages to developers and consumers. What those powers are at the moment might not seem the most profound, but give it time. Let it propigate out into the world. In the meantime, stop your horrific coding practices for styling and marking up your code with your own personal stamp. When it comes to scenerios where a microformat would prove to be a worthwhile cause, such as:

• People and Organizations
• Calendars and Events
• Opinions, Ratings and Reviews
• Social Networks
• Licenses
• Tags, Keywords, Categories
• Lists and Outlines

write code that adopts the microformat. I promise you more meaning will come to your code.

Shaun Inman has always been an innovative developer, be it with IFR or his plug-in designed analystics program mint. Now Shaun comes up with a new way of viewing web information over time. His new redesign shows the aging and decay of his posts via color contrasting. As posts decay over time, information becomes less and less relevant, as outdated techniques are replaced with modern pratice and topical items lose their impact.

The notion of decay on the web, in my humble opinion, has never been dealt with properly and Shaun’s site take that next step to help the user determine meaning. Searching through google for fresh content leads you down the rabbit hole, which never quite leads you to the most appropriate destination. This proves one ultimate truth about the web: its very nature is that content has a shelf life. Content has no meta-data associated with it to define its time and relivance to that time. Simply supplying a date to the post might not provide enough meaning for the user to uncover relevance. So, what tools does the web developer have has their disposal to provide context? Color and Content.

The idea is indeed brilliant but I have my issues with this choice of decay. He’s gone from a dark tones, which symbolize the freshest content, to a lighter tone, as content fades away. While we can talk sematically about the nature of decay and the Goethe-est poetics of color as we fade away, I wonder if Shaun’s users will see the importance of dark tones as new content? Fresh, to me, is much like the adverts for Laundry Detergiant: pretty girls running through a field of tall grass and fresh linen sheets. The imagery of freshness is light. Inman has done ever so well to develop a system to help add meaning to the decay of content, I just think he’s missed perhaps the most important detail of all: the impression of what decay is…. a slow fade to darkness.