Wed Mar 9 04:01:37 PST 2011
an open letter to rob cockerham
Rob, baby! Love the site. Big fan, for years. Big fan.
Except the design has always sucked ass. Just terrible. It had a certain "Copyright 1995, Best viewed in Netscape Communicator" charm, but otherwise, terrible. Lousy.
The new design throws even that away. It's not good, it's bad. I think you were going for a Cinerama-logo effect with the header, there, but baby, you missed. Really missed. I'm talking reporter-killing levels of inaccuracy here. Country miles. Barns, and their broad sides.
The list of design sins goes on. Drop shadows on some columns and not others. Borders on some elements and not others. Contradictory UI metaphors. Suspiciously spammy SEO links in sidebars. "About" link buried in a sidebar. Piles of article links that don't include quotes. It's a horrorshow, really. And, of course, the design doesn't extend to any of the posts, which is vintage cockeyed.com unstyled HTML.
I'm no design guro, as anybody who isn't using screenreading software can tell. Thus, in self-defense, I adopted the ultraminmalism which so many coders use to conceal their incompetence.
There's the word! I know I'm incompetent, so I don't overstep myself. Three columns? Sounds kinda risky. Better just use two. Less to go wrong. You should have done that, Rob! It would have been a good idea!
Love, bbot.