

Embracing Minimalism as a Web Designer - NathanKP
http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-minimalistic-design-for-experiment.html

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edd
"As mentioned earlier more people are using iPhones, net books, and other
portable devices for viewing the internet. The future of internet browsing
will probably involve smaller screens, and thusly larger fonts should, in my
opinion, be adopted."

Really? Why don't you stop sizing everything exactly an use a relative
measure. Surely it is the job of the device to chose how big a letter should
be displayed. One of my biggest frustrations with the web is how long it is
taking to get to a point where we can stop using bitmaps to build sites.

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NathanKP
I didn't use bitmaps in the site design, only in the article. All the fonts
(unless I missed a few) have sizes defined as a percentage so that the device
can choose a base font size and I can modify it from there.

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niyazpk
Just finished writing a minimalistic wordpress theme. The focus was to hide
_all_ the unwanted noise (categories, tags, rss buttons, ads etc) from the
view and make the text highly readable.

Demo: <http://clear.kera.la/2009/12/a-theme-for-wonderful-writers/>

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lsb
Ryan Tomayko's theme is even more sparing; his name is the only hyperlink
above the comments. See <http://tomayko.com/writings/rack-cache-announce>

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niyazpk
My initial idea was to do something similar - do away with everything other
than the article title + text and push everything else to the footer, but then
I thought that it would be a radical design decision (as far a blog is
concerned).

Will try to clean up a bit more.

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richcollins
I think that my friend Steve has the best minimalist blog design that I've
seen: <http://dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi>

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herdrick
Very nice. But all those vertical alignments are bothering me. I think if he
moved the text bodies of the posts to the left to align with the dates, it'd
be better. Also, his posts are short so those titles and dates are dominating
the page. Maybe making them smaller and making the titles the same shade of
grey as the dates would help.

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ThinkWriteMute
Related to the article but: Why is Blogger the red-headed step child of
Google? I stopped using it recently because over the last 3 years it's barely
changed. Posting a comment requires 3 page refreshes, 1 auto-scroll, and
breaks the look of the website.

There are so many simple things Google could do to improve Blogger. Obvious
things too.

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stan_rogers
The comment problem is template-settable -- you don't need to go to the
generic Blogger comments form. Mind you, the documentation is a little on the
opaque side, and one really needs to be interested enough to go through all of
the tags. The CAPTCHA time-out issue is a bit of a problem for longer comments
for us slow typists (or, I suppose, for _deliberate_ thinkers), and the only
real answer for including background images is to base64-encode them in data
URI on the stylesheet -- the browser will give up before getting them from the
associated Picassa album about half the time if you use a URL as a src. Since
the stylesheet is part of the page (not cached), that means the images need to
be kept small -- good discipline, perhaps, but it ought to be a choice.

The only real missing link I've run across is the ability to create honest-to-
goodness static content, something that won't show up in the blog archive --
although there are values available in the latest template tagset that
indicate that something of the sort is at least under consideration. (At the
moment, there is no way to intercept entry generation in the archive menu-
writing loop, although you can use content tagging to rip a full-length or
abstracted entry out of the normal page run.)

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selven
For the website, I would recommend putting some of the non-content bits
(links, buttons, login, etc.) on the side, not on the top. Studies have shown
that reading is faster and more comfortable with narrower columns, and the
30-45 cm found in modern laptops is way too wide. There's nothing wrong with
having a lot of vertical screen space though.

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ThinkWriteMute
You know what I love? When some web designer makes my browsing area _even
smaller_ on my Netbook. I just love that.

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est
21st century electronic systems can't even do fluid layout properly. How
ironic.

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ThinkWriteMute
Here's what you would have said if you wanted to be correct:

 _20th Century mark up languages are absolutely retarded for designing web
pages and breed bad layout design._

Yeah, I know I'm going to get down-voted because people lurv HTML, but having
had to whip it into shape lately this was totally worth it.

~~~
est
It's funny to see how HTML5 is _so_ 21st century.

