I'm designing my own blog template in Mephisto, the Rails blogging package. I tried to do a photographic, dark-colored one and I was unhappy with the results. I actually spent uh, like, 12 hours messing around looking for stock photos on the Internet, messing with Photoshop and CSS, and I'm not happy with the results.
Now, part of this is the fact that I'm really not much of a designer. I don't think the stuff I create is ugly, it's just not as good as what people like 37 Signals and Joyent can do. But I think another part of it is that minimalist layouts with very little fancy design stuff to them are somehow more trustworthy. I don't know if trying to be flashy is even worth it. Fancy designer products with cool graphics like the ones that Yayhooray.com members create all the time are normally viewed in contexts where there's an a priori expectation of elaborate commercial art: t-shirts, television commercials, CD covers, and other areas where there's a longstanding tradition of going all out. I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here. I just think that fancy photoshoppy layouts somehow don't feel right. For example, www.nikeplus.com - the site has such intense colors and it really bothers me. I don't like how everything is curved, round, and gradient-y, and red like a muhfugg. I also think Amazon and MySpace are horribly designed. I wish sites like that would just focus on the basics. What's everyone's approach towards design? For now, I'm going to be sticking to my old minimalist style I developed years ago because it's all I know. Warren P.S. Have you noticed how big-name people like Zeldman don't talk much about hands-on techniques for web design anymore? Instead they talk about how to apply that to creating businesses and products. _______________________________________________ Sdruby mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sdruby.com/mailman/listinfo/sdruby
