Some design changes
Not many design changes, but a few. I started out thinking the post text size was too big, but then I decided to reduce the elements around it. That felt more comfortable. For now. Three other issues I'm thinking about:
–Blockquotes. I've tried them out for a few months now, but they feel like a lot of white space. I'd rather work the quotes into the posts, but sometimes lengthy quotes are necessary. Thus my indecision.
–General post width. The width, for some reason, still feels a little uncomfortable. I've tried lines around the posts; now I've turned those off. I don't know. I need usability testing in my apartment.
–Italics. I go by USAT's itals policy — and went by CNN's when I worked there — just to keep in practice. So publication names, album names, song titles, etc are all in itals. But honestly, I've had some postmodern angst about this for a few years. In a media-soaked world, should media titles be treated any differently than regular proper nouns? The italics bring an extra level of emphasis that feels, to me, like it does too far. Same with the quote marks that the AP and plenty of other news groups use.
Consider it. Haven't The Washington Post and How I Met Your Mother and My Love become as culturally common as Jim and Suzie and PNC Bank? The usual-italicized words do tend to use some lower-case separators that aren't common to regular proper nouns, but is that really enough to justify the itals?
I haven't totally convinced myself yet. But something's there.
March 14th, 2009 at 7:10 PM
[...] Me stretching it some: It's like the set-aparts for pop cultural titles. [...]