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(Epi)Centrist designers

Thursday | July 1, 2004 | 1:27 pm  

Leave it to the folks at 37signals to come with up a great name and method for Web design — epicenter-​based design.

This is some­thing that I, and prob­a­bly a lot of design­ers, have been doing, both con­sciously and sub­con­sciously for a while. This is a great exam­ple of the “Architectural Digest discussion” that we should be having.

Blogs are very pop­u­lar — for a vari­ety of rea­sons — but one thing that inter­ests me is how pop­u­lar the design of blogs have become… even for non-​blog sites.

The default tem­plates of most blog pub­lish­ing sys­tems, and most of the custom tem­plates out there, epit­o­mize this epi­cen­trist design idea.

What makes a blog a blog is its con­tent — so put it front and center and let the rest of the page ele­ments flow around this center.

While I agree with almost all of the points made over at Medi­aSavvy about why News­pa­pers should be more like a blog, I’d like to add “Design your site to be more like a blog.”

I think this content-​focused, reverse-​chronological way of pre­sent­ing fre­quently updated con­tent — that has orig­i­nated with blogs — is quickly becom­ing the defacto UI for pre­sent­ing news online.

This will become even more so, I sus­pect, as RSS read­ers and news­pa­per feeds end up in the hands of more consumers.

Those apps, for the most part, default to a very “blog-like” view of the incom­ing entries — whether they be news sto­ries, soft­ware updates, or even good deals on Apple goods.

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