Is it just me, or are good IA’s trying to tell me something? A couple of the more well known blogs on the internet launched redesigns last week, Eater and Boing Boing both within a week or so of one another.
If you’re comparing the design…there isn’t much comparison. Eater just absolutely crushes Boing Boing, who seriously seems like they lost their mind by getting rid of their previous well-known (and loved) logo and typeface to replace it with something that reminds me of the Radisson re-brand. The rest of it color, typefaces, everything… is just baffling and awful. Eater on the other hand, polished up their look nicely, evolved the logo with a perfect inspiration from Florent, made it cleaner and easier to read and built a communication system that eases the information intake. Classic work from Kevin and his team at Hard Candy Shell who I’ve always felt were some of the best online publishing UI peeps out there.
But what I found curious was the similarities between the two from a layout perspective. They both move to the two column format (from the previous 3 column still seen at curbed.com and racked.com), they both widen the blog format to nearly the same pixel length, approximately 450-500 pixels w/o gutter. They both added similar retweet buttons and minimize the social sharing buttons…and they both created subject category highlight zones at the top of the page in square sized buckets with a classic table of contents type interface included for quick browsing as navigation.
These are the leaders, so I would guess that their research and insight has determined these are optimal choices…so I’m paying attention (at when it comes to daily updating, publishing driven “blog” style sites).
As a sidenote, not really getting the ‘new posts’ ticker on Eater. There is a part of me that likes knowing the new activity, but I have no concept of when that refreshes and it seems to be the same for me every time I return to the site so its not providing much value.
Will post an update with more thoughts when I have a chance to speak with Kevin. What are you thoughts?
