Daring Fireball

As a blog, this site's design is much simpler than the other sites I've covered. The design is very minimalistic. The site uses one colour in its palette, grey, so it takes the emphasis on few colours to the extreme. This is excluding the ad on the left hand side, but that is under limited control of the designer. Iconography is very limited as well, with the only graphic element being star, in the logo and as secondary links. The lack of graphic distraction creates a subdued, zen feel and draws attention to the text.

Furthermore, there is an almost complete lack of boxes or dividers to separate the content on the page from the background. The background is one solid colour, and the left and right borders are defined indrectly by the margin of the text, which is fixed width. The lack of borders makes the text feel less constricted, despite the tight crop. There is a very subtle use of dots to separate entries when viewing them in bulk, but that does not create a box effect. Link posts and full entries are distinguished clearly by use of type; full entries have a bigger header. Text is set small at default, but there is enough line height to make it readable.

One really good thing is that the headers in link posts link directly to the source, with a secondary star link to view the post by itself. This mirrors the intentions of readers, whose priorities is to read the source in a link post, whereas some blogs often do the opposite e.g. engadget.

The sidebar links are fairly intuitive (even if colophon is a bit obscure of a word). One flaw is that the linked list and display preferences links are at the bottom of the page. There doesn't seem to be any reason to separate them from the rest of the links, and I almost missed them because of their location, and the length of the page.

Link