No sense of style

July 6, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized 

So I’m learning the hard way that trying to design the overall look and feel for a website is freaking difficult if you have no sense of style. Sleightly is supposed to be a directory, so I’ve been looking around at other directories, trying to figure out how they do things, and I’m amazed at how little I know.

Take a look at this Yellow Pages listing for “Magic” in “Vancouver”. Forget about the content of the results, just look at it.

There’s over an inch of good whitespace on either side of the listings. Where did they come up with that idea? Don’t get me wrong, it looks good, but at what point did somebody decide that it would look better with that much whitespace? And why THAT much? Why not an inch more? Or a half-inch less? And notice, for those at a resolution that’s higher than 600×800, it’s not like that because of the window being expanded all the way and it automatically spaced itself out. Shrink the window, and you’ll see the whitespace was deliberately set at that length.

(EDIT… Ah, I see it’s because it’s a blank space left for company logos such as for those listings further down. Fine. But why keep it that length with a big strip of white space for regular listings? Is that “good” design? I’m not being sarcastic here, I honestly don’t know.)

And why that much space between listings, while we’re at it? I suppose one could say that just because we were forced into compact styles because of print costs doesn’t mean we need it for the web (technically, it makes no discernable difference to the webpage’s size on the computer), but what inspired that? And what are we supposed to extrapolate from that?

So, I’m just going to throw this out there to the blog readership. Yup, all five of you guys.

What font do you like? What size do you like? Do you like things spaced out or compact? Do you think the Yellow Pages listing is one to emulate in terms of overall spacing and layout? What about the layout for a Google search result? Or is there something else you prefer?

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