Typophile

CRIT REQUEST FOR WEBLOG BUILT FROM SCRATCH

greyjay

Hello fellow type lovers.

I recently made the jump from the print design world to the web design world this past year and partnered with a friend and former design colleague to build websites. We decided to try our hand in building a design blog & CMS for ourselves from the ground up — no wordpress, no blogger, no drupal. Needless to say, it was a massive learning experience for the both of us but it's been fun and gratifying and that makes it worth it.

Before we release this thing out into the wild world web we thought it would probably be a smart idea to solicit some of the sites in the design community we respect and frequent for some critiques and tips. And basically, when it comes to sage design advice and inspiration, I really don't think there's any design community out there better than typophile. That said, if anyone here has a quick second to take a look and kick the tires of this thing, we would really appreciate the feedback.

http://www.sugarpillfactory.com/blog

I am expecting a fair amount of, "Times New WTF ital.?" but I really wanted the look to be a bit different than what I see every single day over the web. I'm so sick of web-safe fonts it hurts. So be ready... the body is Times New Roman — Italic. We like it for the time being... although I'm positive not everyone will.

Let me know what you think and thanks in advance!

PublishingMojo

I love the look. I'll bet the content is great too. Just wait a second while I copy and paste it into MS Word and convert it into Roman so I can read it.

LisaO

I clicked through to the link but everything is super light and I can't click on anything, although I can ctrl+A and select all the text. (I'm using the latest version of firefox)

But from what I think I can see, it looks really nice.

greyjay

@ PublishingMojo: hahaha!

@ LisaO: Hmmm... that's really odd. We are trying to figure out why this may have happened. We have an overlay gallery for images and it loads in flash, and when that happens it "washes out" the background... I'm guessing something weird went wrong with that. Good to know.

celinenguyen

Your print background shows. ;) It looks gorgeous (the stickers next to the post titles!), and I love it, but I have to seriously question using italics for the body text. It's hard to read.

Love your colour scheme, though!

May I ask what typeface you're using for the sidebar sections ('Categories', 'Recent Posts', and so on)? I think I fell in love with the capital G.

aluminum

"no wordpress, no blogger, no drupal. Needless to say, it was a massive learning experience"

You learned to just use Wordpress. ;o)

But yea, it's a good lesson to go through.

Aesthetically, the visual design is quite nice.

Technically, I'm seeing a lot of tables. Why is that? tsk, tsk! ;o)

greyjay

@ celinenguyen Thanks! At this point, we think we will be implementing an italics on/off button in the future. A massive wall of italics can be a bit stressful on the eye and brain... I just love the look of it so much... and I guess I really like seeing something different too... but, because purpose number one of a blog is to relay information, you, and many other people are correct, the italics is probably not the way to go. Beyond that, there are some legibility issues in a few key spots, which is something I'm am still learning to grasp making the jump from a 300dpi world to 72dpi.

The font in the side column you're speaking of is one of Adrian Frutiger's masterpieces (and one of my all time favorite sans-serifs): Univers (59 Ultra Condensed)... my God I love this font. I would put it head to head against Helvetica any day. The G: beautiful... you should see the Q!

@ aluminum Hahaha. Yes, I think after doing something like this you really learn to appreciate the value of wordpress, but I'm really happy we did it, we have learned SO much — one of those things being the no-nos of table usage — will be avoiding them unless absolutely necessary in the future. :)

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