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"The best thing that could happen to Apple this year would be for Microsoft’s Zune 2.0 to be a kick-ass product, both technologically and in terms of being designed to make customers happy, not entertainment conglomerates. Apple needs competition." — given recent activity, actual competition would keep Apple engaged and honest; right now they have the mobile phone and media player markets sewn up - complacency breeds contempt.
"Great work from Brad Choate and Walt Dickinson at Six Apart. I’m upgrading to MT 4 just for this." — although a little iphone fixated, Gruber does have a point - managing content on the go is a massively cool thing.
I believe I finally understand why John Gruber took what seems such excruciating pains, in picking his colour and font scheme for daring fireball.
“It took me six weeks to choose the exact shade of Daring Fireball’s background color, #4a525a.” ∞
If you spend enough time working on a concept or theory, you will eventually find the right answer.
John could have decided over the course of perhaps a day or so. But would that have resulted in the same colour choice? And would that different choice, flow on to affect other choices? It’s not a simple question to answer.
Patience in design is terribly difficult to master, yet can be so very crucial to outcome.
Often the quick choice, isn’t the right choice. And that decision may result in unintended or unexpected effects long after the design is laid down. Indeed it’s one of the core reasons this post exists at all.
If one takes a fast-and-loose approach, accepting of the ‘close-enough’, the end result cannot be anything other than hit-and-miss — and it’s going to eventually force a re-design, when the current layout doesn’t consider long term goals. By ensuring all points are covered, the design will stand the rigours of daily use, indefinitely.
When looking at this design, which in my defence, certainly has evolved some, I simply cannot step past the fact that it’s not going anywhere in particular and doesn’t have a core design philosophy, structure or ethic. It’s very much a little-from-column-a and a little-from-column-b mashed together to create something I was more-or-less ok with.
I started out, in part, with a basic (and I do mean basic) HTML design, pre-set and expanded on the concept from there.
I’m not afraid to admit that my design skills at the time were (and to an extent still are) less than stellar.. I’ve only really started to grasp the potential behind CSS and XHTML, not to mention a new fascination in typeface and type-setting, in the last 6-9 months, not an overly long period of time at all, when contrasted with those with many many years of experience and understanding.
This may seem at odds, given I’ve released two wordpress plugins and a theme — yet all three involved a (sometimes steep) learning curve. And I’m still learning. I’ll never stop, in fact.
Sure, there have been a number of requests for this very design to be packaged and released — but I’ve long since come to the realisation that handing over an entire ‘brand’ in theme form isn’t a smart idea. It can and does, often without intention, dilute the original concept.
Indeed, some theme authors will offer a spin-off design, inspired by a current layout — often a popular move, and at least there is some separation and uniqueness. But when you let your current design go, as-is, aren’t you saying it’s no longer important to you? If it was - surely you’d protect that design and ethos? It should matter.
Given I am not happy with this design and, perhaps, never have been, I cannot in good faith package it for release. That would not be fair on your part, or mine. I cannot stand by this design, so it has no place in anyone else’s hands.
Now, ponder daring fireball again, for a moment. The design has changed little over the last few years, aside from an occasional tweak to the logo, and I believe I can perhaps point out why. It ticked all the right boxes from day one — it was engineered, if you will, to meet the authors needs and wants, so why change it? John again:
“I did not design Daring Fireball by starting with one of Movable Type’s default templates. I started the visual design with a blank sheet of paper, and then moved on to an empty Photoshop file.”
Why is this an important concept to grasp? Why start from absolute scratch? Surely spring-boarding off an existing concept, even a rough model, is something we’re all being told is a grand idea? Take the current trend towards pre-built frameworks such as eswat, yaml and blueprintcss to name but a few.
As someone who had a limited (but rapidly growing) understanding of PHP and XHTML, the above would have been (and still is) a great way to push something out, with limited lead-time and, thanks to the pre-built structure, it would work pretty much right out of the box. Great huh?
Well, in a way, I’ve already tried that. Taking a basic design idea and completely re-moulding to suit my needs. The problem with an original design, and indeed that of any existing framework, is at least part of the fundamental structural corner-stone is already set. The core philosophy and structure are off-limits, to an extent.
That changes everything. It’s not your drafted idea made manifest — it’s a fresh face to someone else’s structure.
Again, for time-sensitive applications, frameworks are the ultimate solution and some have gained a great deal of traction with a number of established and well seasoned designers. They offer a standardised, often modular approach that would fit a number of goals in many applications.
When using a framework I sacrifice control in return for expediency. It wasn’t designed by me, thus it cannot ever truly represent or reflect who I am. This is a blog, not a web based application suite, or current web 2.0 site-of-the-moment. Design is as much in respect of the nut-and-bolt, as it is the window vestiges — it should reflect the expected content and ultimately, the author, not someone else’s vision.
There is one final comment Gruber makes, that resonates strongly and truly answers my question, “why start from scratch?”.
“If you start with nothing, you’re forced to think about everything.”
By starting from scratch I will have to develop an entire solution, that ticks all boxes, from day one. Something I can be entirely comfortable with — and that won’t happen in a five minute brain-storm and sketch binge.
This mandates fundamental concepts, structure, flow and balance that I’ll have to draft out, perhaps over and over and over again, until it’s right. From URI construction, graphic design and CSS, to XHTML structure and underlying code — everything.
John Gruber, who is a long-time Fake Steve follower has recently
written a piece on the outing of Fake Steve and there are a few points I’d like to expand on — whilst he also covers
the attempt to ‘unpop’ the cork, I would like to start by covering this comment:
“The second erroneous reaction is […]
“So, here’s what I’m trying: As of about an hour ago, the main feed now contains the full content of the site, available to everyone free of charge.” — this is great news, except for paid up members whom now have a pointless membership and advertising thrown in for kicks.. nice.
"A lot of IT infrastructure is fragile rickety crap, and the people responsible for it aren’t smart enough to fix it so they make rules and place blame.." — no, the ‘people responsible’ are cost-fixated management, not the grunts expected to support it
"Writing an email is like writing an article. Only quote the relevant parts, interspersing your new remarks between the quoted passages." — agreed, in this case, less is more.
Or how I stopped being concerned about comments and learned to love the content.
There has been a bit of blogger activity of late, primarily surrounding John Gruber’s decision a while back to roll
comment free and whether it’s actually a darn good move.
Obviously the first pay-off is an immediate cessation of needing to care about […]
