B logazines are the latest craze in online publishing. They are blogs that take design cues from the funkier print magazines.
The best examples come from user interface (UI) designers who are demonstrating that the web doesn't have to come in neat boxes and screeds of text. Some of these are stunning -- they really get one thinking about the possibilities of the web.
But here's why you don't want anything to do with blogazines:
Consistency
There are all sorts of other reasons to avoid them, including the huge amount of time in css coding each post will take, but consistency is the biggy.
The designer of a print magazine has more latitude to bend the rules. No matter how bizarre the layout of an individual article, the reader always knows roughly where they are in the universe: somewhere between the covers of the magazine they just picked up.
On the web, all it takes is a single click to find yourself in
Horse and Hound or the
National Geographic Readers are less confident about where they are in the virtual world. The fact that one of your web pages looks a lot like another is actually very reassuring. It tells the reader they are still somewhere within your site.
I have been impressed with the work of
Dustin Curtis But the reaction of everyone I have shown his site to (so far) has been:
What?
Great when I explain what it is about; not so good as a functional website.
But Dustin and other UI designers show us that blogs don't have to be boring. The limiting factor is not imagination. Most blog designs are boring because they are easy. The UI guys are creating a custom style sheet for each blog post (or generating reams of inline styles) and that is hard work.
What print magazine designers do is create a grid that is flexible. Most don't, in practice, create an entirely new design for each article (for the same reasons: consistency and time). But the underlying structure of the page layout makes it easier for them to create stunning visuals while maintaining a familiarity from one spread to the next.
The web offers similar possibilities. Design is based on cascading style sheets (css). You can have a single css file for your whole site or you can create one for each page. But there is another option with potential.
You browser doesn't care if you put your design into one css file or split it between several. Cleverly created, you could have a site-wide design that kept key elements fixed and consistent but allowed flexibility in other elements. You could then have simpler css files for each page to generate the variety you need to keep your site interesting.
It is going to taking some working out, but this blogazine idea has really got me
thinking
Note:
Time to write post: 12 minutes.
Time to code css: 4 hours 20 (I may be exaggerating)
