The Blog Studio

Shortly after the launch of Michelle Malkin’s new site, Ed Morrissey from the Captain’s Quarters blog approached us about redesigning his extremely popular blog. Needless to say, we jumped at the opportunity.

Ed’s blog was looking tired. The content had outgrown the template. The sidebars in particular were really messy. In short, it looked like a blog in need of a freshening up.

Ed (who is awesome, btw) wrote a post telling his readers that there was a redesign in the works. While some respondents were pleased, the majority were worried. What if we messed up the site they had come to love?

What we did: Wireframes

As usual, we started by wireframing the site. Wire frames are a critical step in the design process for a bunch of reasons. The wireframe focusses on the layout of the content. We’ve found that once you introduce design elements, it becomes nearly impossible for a client to focus on the details. Color and imagery take over their minds!

With Captain’s Quarters blog, we focussed on the sidebar, and trying to better integrate the main ad and comic strip into the top of the design. The readers made it very clear: the comic strip had to stay at the top of the page.

Designing a wireframe is a lot like doing a puzzle. You start out by examining the pieces, and getting a sense of what will fit where. Because they are both quite wide, the comic and the main ad determined the column widths. Click on the thumbnail of the wireframe graphic to see what we came up with.

What we did: Design

Good blog design is all about balance. A blog page has a lot of content on it – often very visually jumbled content. Making sure it isn’t overpowering means giving everything space, and making sure elements are properly aligned. Our brains do not respond well to jumbles. They need to make sense of information. Information is much easier to make sense of when there is a clear visual hierarchy. Balance helps set that.

When I sat down to work on the design, I took at look at the graphics Ed had sent me to use for the header. They were terrific scenes of naval battles. Very Hornblower. The thing is, they were quite small. We had planned on a 960 pixel wide header, and I couldn’t up-size the images to that width without serious image loss. That meant I could either stitch a couple of images together, limit the image to only a part of the header, or shrink the header.

I chose the latter, because it solved a big problem, involving the comic and the ad.

With the layout we had designed in the wireframe, the comic and the ad were right next to each other. These two visually heavy blocks were creating a disconnect between the header and the content.  There was a 200px high divide across the upper part of the page. By making the header narrower, I was able to break that divide, and use the header artwork at full resolution.

Following that, the design just came together. The previous design used the font Charlemagne for the header. I think it’s a totally appropriate font, so reused it for the navigation and sidebar titles. You can see from the graphic below that the first comp is very close to the site we eventually launched. I reused the blue background from the previous design, but it just didn’t work. Ed gave me the go-ahead to change it, and we were all but done.

What we did: Functionality

A key weapon in our fight against sidebar bloat is javascript. Using javascript, we can selectively hide and show content, based on user interaction. Ed has a massive blogroll. It’s easily in the 100s of sites. We decided to chop it into more digestable sections, and “hide” each section behind a button. Clicking that button causes that section of the blogroll to scroll down.

(Depending on your browser, you may or may not see that behavior as of today. There’s a conflict with some of the other JS that we’re still sniffing out.)

What we did: Markup, MT Templates, and launch

The only point I’d like to make here is that when working on a MovableType site with over 11,000 posts, be prepared to wait a very long time between rebuilds.

Usually, we’re able to launch a site in a couple of hours. We transfer the files and database from our development server to the client’s, make a few tweaks, and we’re done. With Captain’s Quarters blog that process took a couple of days. Ed’s server was having a melt-down! The server was under a harsh spam attack, and kept buckling under the weight of multiple simultaneous comments and massive site rebuilds.

I respect the heck out of SixApart and what they’ve done for blogging. But man, it can take a lot of time to launch an MT or TypePad site.

Big kudos for Ed for keeping his head cool through all of the hassles and delays.

The end result

The response to the site has been really positive. You can’t make everyone happy, and frankly, that’s not our job. We seem to have accomplished our mission. The site is fresh, with a whole new colour palette and re-jigged layout. Yet it retains it’s essential quality and character.

Most unusually, I’m quite happy with this design. Usually, I quite detest my work. Something about this sits well with me. There are still a few tweaks to be made, and the site will continue to improve.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. If you found it useful or interesting, please let me know, and I’ll write some more.

I’m listening to William Gibson talking to Cory Doctorow about innovation, the cost of retail space, and the limiting opportunities that exist for micro-brands to reach street-level audiences in our ever more expensive cities.

Their point is of course valid. I know only too well how the cost of retail space can force bankruptcy on an otherwise healthy business. But I’m surprised that neither Gibson or Doctorow brought up the nearly zero cost involved with setting up a storefront online.

Yes, I can already hear you saying “but online is no match for street level retail when it comes to selling local micro-brands”. But frankly, that’s outdated thinking. Instead, I’d ask “why are you still thinking of geographic markets when you could be thinking of social markets?”

I’m working on a couple of fashion related projects at the moment (three of them actually), and as such have been immersed in the world of online style for a couple of months. During this period, my mind has been blown time and again by sites like stylehive.com, notcot.org, etsy.com and others. These sites allow the tiniest of micro-brands to flourish. The pyramidical model of social networks allows these micro-brands to reach markets far faster and for far lest cost than by setting up a retail storefront. If, as a micro-brand owner, you can get a social influencer to buy and recommend your product, you have instant legitimacy within a wider market.

So it isn’t true that skyrocketing retail costs are killing the micro-brand. It is true that the skill set needed to succeed at small level retail has changed dramatically. But that’s a story for another post.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I recently went through my feed reader and cut my feeds down by about half. My criteria for choosing who to trash was pretty simple: does this site regularly published original, relevant content? To my surprise, I found that I was removing many of the feeds I’ve been following for years.

When I considered why, the answer was obvious: blogger burnout. But that’s not the cause, it’s a symptom. What was causing so many once-prolific bloggers to stop?

There are a bunch of easy answers that spring to mind: ennui, the cyclical nature of inspiration, change in priorities, lack of time…

It’s that last one that really hit me between the eyes. Lack of time. What happened that caused so many once successful bloggers to no longer have the time to post? They became busy. New opportunities came up. They became speakers, writers, and business owners. This happened, in large part, because they had been blogging!

I don’t think there has ever been a platform as successful as blogging for promoting one’s abilities. Those of us who jumped on the wagon early experienced this. It happened so quickly though, that we haven’t really had time to digest it. Blogging helped make us what we are today. And unfortunately, many of us have forgotten what got us here in the first place.

I suspect that many of us who have stopped posting have taken blogging for granted. We’ve forgotten that it was by actively blogging that we landed the gigs we currently hold.

This is dangerous. The blogging world has changed. It’s bigger, faster, and more sophisticated than ever. It’s not as easy to be a star as it was two years ago. Blogging is as effective as ever at helping you land opportunities, but it’s a demanding mistress, and must be treated with ongoing care if it’s to keep throwing goodies your way.

So consider this a long-winded wake up call to those of us who need it. It’s easy to take blogging for granted. Blogging remains an amazingly effective way to uncover opportunities. But just because it worked for us doesn’t mean we should give it up. If the lives we lead today are in part due to the successes we’ve had with blogging, we owe it to ourselves to no longer take blogging for granted.

I’m a book whore. Offer me a free book, and I’m all yours (yes, I’m that easy). So when received an email a while back asking if I’d be interested in a copy of a new book on logo design, it didn’t take me long to say yes.

The book, Design Matters // Logos, from Rockport Publishers arrived a couple of weeks ago. Knowing I’d need some reading material for an upcoming holiday, I held off cracking the covers. I’m glad I did, because when I finally did sit down to review the book, I ended up reading it cover to cover.

See, this book differs from it’s logo gallery brethren in that it offers a practical, step by step review of the logo design process. It’s clearly written by people who care deeply about branding and logo design.

The book is laid out in sections: Planning, Creating, Implementing, Case Studies, and Gallery. If you’ve read any of my design related writing, you know I’m a huge proponent of planning. This book dedicates 42 pages to the subject. Each sub-topic is given a two page spread, with plenty of examples and some terrific info graphics (Yes! Info! Graphics!).

This is a book for the professional designer, and as such is immediately head and shoulders above many in this crowded publishing niche. It focusses on strategy, not just the standard color/type/form explanations we expect from logo books.

This is a very useful and inspirational book. The gallery contains only a few logos I’ve seen elsewhere. The quality of the selections is very high. The authors clearly have a passion for their craft, and it is infectious. What’s more, it’s cheap, at under $30. Get all the details at the publisher’s website.

I’m back from 10 days in the bush, with the tan and scraggly beard to prove it. There’s nothing like firing up the feed reader to find 5,000+ unread posts to motivate one to prune the tree a bit. This is always a tricky thing. As blogging has exploded, the time I’m willing to dedicate to keeping on top of it all has imploded.

In choosing which feeds to trash, I found that I instinctively removed the a lot of the old A-listers in favor of the new B and C-listers. (Note that I’m using the whole A-list thing as a short hand for traffic, not to imply that there is anything special about the writers). I’ve noticed that (like me), many of the original A-listers have either stopped blogging, or simply link to other blogs. As an aside, this is probably because of the success that blogging brought these folks. Ironically, they’re now too busy to keep blogging!

As I’ve written previously, I’m just average enough to act as an indicator for my cohort. I’m the canary in the coalmine for my psycho-socio-enconomic-interest group. In other words, if I’m dropping a bunch of feeds, I’m pretty darn sure I’m not alone.

In other words, if I want The Blog Studio to remain on people’s feed readers, I’d better start cranking out some decent content! Ironically, during this latest lull in posting, our RSS subscriber numbers has grown. Heck, maybe if I keep up my non-posting schedule, we’ll crack the A-list ourselves!

So yes, this is another one of those posts that says “expect more posts soon”. We’ve been taking blogging for granted lately. Which just happens to be the topic of my next post ;)