mono

Robert Scoble is the latest to post an opinion on Well-Designed Weblogs, and he makes a number of good points on the merits of readability over "prettiness", taking my weblog as an example:

Lars Holst is doing a series on “well designed weblogs.” Except his is not well designed. Why do I say that? He's using a gray font over a white background. That makes it a lot harder to read.

This is a good example of constructive criticism. In just a few sentences Robert implicitly defines one of his criteria for "well-designed" (readability), gives a concrete example of where the study object's design breaks, and why it matters.

That Robert is the first to point this out doesn't make it any less of a valid argument. That grey looks better to me on my screen, doesn't make it the best choice for other people and other screens. And although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, readability is in the screen of the reader.

Consequently there are times when readability has to be improved at the expense of aesthetics. To this end I have changed the font color from grey (#555) to a very dark blue (#003).

So is all well then? Not quite:

Make the darn thing easy to read. Forget making it pretty. If you try to make it pretty we'll just read it in our RSS News Aggregator which doesn't pass along design info anyway.

No, 'we' will not. And certainly not for the reasons quoted. The weblogs I exclusively read in my aggregator are those that are not pretty. And because my aggregator uses Verdana, in my eyes a more readable font than Times (for body text on screen), Robert's weblog is one of the few that actually looks better in its syndicated XML version than in its styled HTML form. Mike Hudson's seriocomic, on the other hand, is an example of a weblog that is too beautiful to be missed in anything but its full CSS glory.

This is not to say that I don't like Robert's weblog. I do. It is extremely informative, and in itself an excellent example of how the internet has revolutionized our access to information. Creating, changing, storing, finding, sharing, and presenting this information in the best way is one of the most significant technological challenges of the 21st century.

But the web is also about diversity, identity, pleasure, and beauty. And these are different challenges altogether.

So make the darn thing easy to read. But don't forget making it pretty.

Update: Robert responds. It seems I was wrong in assuming that Robert had set the font property in his style sheet. He hasn't, and changing it is indeed a matter of changing the browser default. Good point, although not declaring a font-family is so rare that I would suggest Robert to add a note on this in a colophon or similar page. We also seem to agree on the importance of usability and readability, and we both like aggregators. But we disagree on the added value of aesthetics in weblog design, and we both seem to have forgotten to mention that visual context not found in feeds, such as navigational elements, search interfaces, archive links, blogrolls, etc., can add functional and informational value beyond simple prettiness.