The Blog Studio

Instead of writing this, I really should be packing. Tomorrow morning I’ve got a 6 hour drive with the kids and dog up to my favorite place on earth, Killarney Provincial Park. No place sings to me quite like this.

Getting ready to leave work is a harrowing experience. I’ve checked and doubled checked, and everything is covered. I’ve got an extremely capable couple of partners manning the desks back at the ranch. Still, it’s hard to shake that “what did I forget” feeling.

While I’m away, I hope to be taking tons of photos with my new camera. I’ve got what feels like 100 pounds of art supplies packed and ready too. Creatively, this should be a blast.

I’m back September 1, and I’ve got a couple of big announcements to make when I’m back. Enjoy the rest of August everyone!

Bloggers: I am your target market. I am the person you want to have reading your content. But guess what? I’m overwhelmed. The web is incredibly noisy and filled with eye candy.

To get me to read your posts, they must follow these rules:

• Use excellent typography and be easy to read.


• If you use images, make them large and sprinkle them throughout the text.


• Use video whenever possible. It’s nearly impossible for me not to click the play button.


• Make regular use of headings.


• Use bold and italic to make it easy to pick out key words as I skim. I skim a body of text before I decide to read it. Give me a reason to double back and read your words.


• Use lists


• Be as brief as possible.

Over on my personal blog, I’m posting a series looking into the redesign and re-thinking of that site. It’s an interesting process. To date, I’ve just posted some shots of my notes. For anyone interested in what goes on a redesign though, it will give you some pretty deep insight as the series continues.

Here are a couple of shots:

Early this year, we helped to launch Primetime Politics. Using a couple of honest-to-god-human political experts, Primetime looked at the best political content on the web each day, and categorized, re-factored, and compared the stories, giving the reader an unbiased, well rounded view of the world. The site was a hit from the get go, quickly growing to 1000s of page views a day.

The original design was clean, crisp and elegant. 

A few months ago though, our clients and I started to talk about redesigning the site. Based on what we knew before we launched the site, we thought clean, crisp and elegant was the ideal look and feel for Primetime Politics. In many senses, it was too. But somewhere along the way, the business plan changed from trying to be a general purpose political news site to a site that focusses more on the experts behind the scenes. Jordan and Assaf, the site owners, are way too smart, way to well spoken, and way too good looking to hiding behind the keyboard!

In addition to featuring the site owners more prominently, Jordan and Assaf wanted to inject a bit more humour, and a lot more partisanship into the content. The elegant design of the site didn’t support either the jokiness or the partisanship. We also wanted to appeal to a younger audience. There are about a billion stuffy right-wing sites out there, but very few conservative sites talk to young voters. We saw this as a serious opportunity. Plus we wanted to roll out a new tagline: Young, Right & Right

So, with the goal of making the site more approachable to a younger audience, more suitable to sarcasm and humour, and more of a showcase for Jordan and Assaf, I pulled out my big box of crayons and got to work.

Because I’m as familiar as I am with the site and the concept, I jumped straight into wireframes.

The layout of the old site was already pretty solid. The biggest change was dropping the featured debate box that had previously occupied the top of the page, and the addition of the larger blog graphics on the left sidebar. Overall, we reduced the number of items on the page dramatically.

Looking back at the original site, there were two things that lent it it’s sober feel: the typography and the colour palette. While I kept the overall blues from the original design, I turned up the saturation and added the contrasting orange to make both colours really pop.

I used the wonderful Archer font for the header and tagline. This font has just the right amount of whimsey.

Keeping with the whimsey factor, I set the tagline outside the box. Everything else on the site sits nicely on a grid line, so this “outside the box” thinking really draws the eye.

The body font is set in Arial, with section headers set in Georgia. I really like this combo for it’s clean lines and readability. Again, note how the colours keep things lively.

That’s it for my first design dissection post. I hope to do many more in the coming weeks as we get ready for our own new site unveiling!

I just realized The Blog Studio is 3 and a half. We’re officially in the cute stage; we’re out of our terrible twos, and love to hug. Just thought you should know.