Critique of Web designs

Feed Mag

Cole: The next site I'll take a look at is Feed Mag. Feed is very much like our friends at word.com: extraordinarily high, high design quotient. They don't use a lot of white backgrounds, but they use gray backgrounds in an interesting way. One of the problems in the world of HTML and the World-Wide Web is that some people have their browsers set for this type of width, and some have it set for that type of width. You have a problem as a designer whether you're going to allow the user to have what we, coming from the print world, think of as the optimal line length. What they've done at Feed kind of force you to have this optimal line length. Of course, you can reset the screen so that it's not so much an optimal line length as a horrible line length. But nevertheless, they've solved this problem in a very interesting way. For those of you who know something about HTML, take a look at this coding. They've somehow magically determined what the optimum line length is. At the end of each line, they put in a line break and put in a little graphic that indents the line, so they're not using true HTML coding to make this happen. What they're doing is finessing the whole thing.

Nevertheless, the site is very, very well designed, as I said before. We see real nice subheads, dropheads -- little indicators that they've got another linked document that comes in. You can follow it into dialogue, more dropheads, pull quotes, whatever magazine terminology you want. I find that the site has a lot of very, very good material. As I said in a memo to these guys, there are a couple of things the writers and editors of the magazine have to say that I personally agree with, so maybe that's why I have so much fondness for the site. I think Feed attempts to address the issues of design the way Word does, but has content much more heavy than what a lot of these sites have. Rosalind?

Resnick: I agree with you David. I happen to like Feed. I see Feed and word.com as being very similar. Both do not come from the world of print. They have sprung fully from cyberspace. The cool thing about Feed magazine, is, unlike word.com that's designed itself as a site to be surfed around, Feed magazine has designed itself as a literary magazine along the lines of Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker. It's interesting because even though it was born in cyberspace, it has chosen the look and feel of a print magazine. Because of the nice icons and the navigational structure -- I like little pull quotes on the sides -- it really manages to pull it off and to become an interesting site that isn't simply a place to come and read. It's also a place to come and discuss what you've read. In fact, one of the cool features of the site is they have something called a dissection of the text, where they have a text document which people can use as a message board to dissect parts of the text and talk about what they liked and didn't like, and how they would even redo it. It's a lot of cool things they're doing. They're playing with the idea of text on the Web and I think they're doing it very successfully. At the same time, the only criticism I have of it is that the articles tend to be long, longer than I think people are willing to read on the Web. And I think it tends to be a little too talky. But I hope that in time that will change, so I would give it one-and-a half thumbs up.

Seybold: I was just delighted when I found this thing because so far, most of the design that we looked at has been graphic design. And this is one of the few things that you can find out there where someone's paid attention to typographic design. This is a word publication designed to look good and be read. Most of the HTML stuff looks absolutely terrible. They might put graphics in it, but the actual text looks really terrible.

The down side is that there's a lot of overhead, more than there would be with straight HTML text. And it takes you longer to get this stuff. That's a down side that I think will go away as the technology improves. This would be a natural for something like Blackbird or the later extension for Netscape, or something, to do this a lot faster than you can currently do it. But I was really, really pleased to see someone paying attention to presenting text well on the Net; that to me sort of outweighs everything else. I would definitely want to suggest people look at this thing to see that you don't have to make text look ugly on the Net.

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