Martin @ Blog

Since a few days Planet Gnome features a new look which is created (as far as I know) by Seth Nickell. As with almost every design change on a relatively big site, there are a lot of critics on the new look. I personally think the new Planet Gnome look is an improvement and the hackergotchi (or how they call the heads without body) on the side looks very nice, while in the previous layout it looked like the heads belong to the actual blog entry text.
Havoc Pennington pointed to a post of Pete Zaitcev (I don’t know who he is or what he does) which says that the only reason why online magazines doesn’t use the entire with of the site for text is that they otherwise don’t have space for advertisements. Pete’s own weblog actually does use the entire with of the browser for text, which instantly proves why his statement is false. While I’m not a graphical designer or something, I surely know that the optimal width of a text is when there are about 12 words on a single line. When the line is wider, the human eye easily lost the correct line when starting at a new line and therefore it is more difficult to read a very wide text. This is already the case on the weblog of Pete on my browser, which isn’t even full screen.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 19:13 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.