How do you define design and user experience obsession? I’d say an excellent indication would be if you spend hours and sometimes days toiling over what seems to be insignificant (to some) very small details. This is exactly what I have been obsessing over for the past week.
Today I launched a newer minimal design for this weblog, which included changing fonts for post titles and body content, as well as relocating the website navigation links from the side bar to the top (underneath the header).
In the past, my de rigueur font choice was always Lucida Grande. I have now decided to go with Georgia with a 14px font size for body content. I find this much easier on the eyes and is an old classic for reading. The choice over the font size was carefully tested, and I settled on it because I could still read content on the page whilst 3 feet away from the screen.
To better differentiate between linked-list and my longer-form article posts, the headlines get different sized fonts and font weights. Headlines for linked posts are 13px, whilst article post headlines are 16px and bold, so they stand out. I added a light-grey dashed border underneath article posts for further emphasis between other style posts as well. In addition to the clear definitions between linked and article posts, I included a handy Tweet button on the longer article posts. I toiled over this decision for a bit and weighed the pros and cons, as well as performance implications any sort of widgets would cause. I don’t plan on cluttering these pages with anything but a single Tweet button so that people can quickly share those longer-form articles.
I’m pretty happy with the way things have turned out so far, and the next major stage will be some under the hood stuff. I’d like to try and figure out how I can make linked-list style posts link to source articles via the post-title.
I know it seems crazy to go into such detail about these kinds of things, but I truly care about them, and I imagine I’m not the only one out there who really sweats over small details like this. The small details count a hell of a lot when it comes to design. There are many readers who are probably using Instapaper to read a lot of what I post here, and that’s really great. For those that don’t, I want the reading experience to be supremely great so that visiting this weblog is not an exercise in pain.
I hope you like it, and please do let me know if you have any feedback. I’m always open to constructive criticism.