| Maybe it's just getting old, but with time I find I've got vastly less patience for cluttered sites. I installed the Stylebot Chrome plugin last May when Google+ rolled out its redesign and my eyes bled. Since then, I've created styles for some 850-odd sites, many quite brief, some longer. The elements I attack: ⚫ Anything that moves. Animations, sliders, pop-ups. ⚫ Fixed elements: headers, footers, fixed-position social bars. ⚫ Fonts. My preferred reading font is 15pt (about 20px on this display). Most sites seem to run between 12-14px, which is painfully small. ⚫ Crappy contrast. Backgrounds should be light. ⚫ Anything "social". If I want to share your content, I've got a perfectly good URL with which to do it. ⚫ Interstitials. If you're relying on those for advertising or messaging, I'll see them precisely once. ⚫ Sidebars. I either nuke them entirely, or de-columnize the page. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1tniu3/user_sit... ⚫ I find call-outs and images floated to the right rather than the left less annoying (at least in ltr languages). So I move those elements to float right, clear right, and pad with 10px (or 0.5 em), add a 1px border, and a 20px (or 1em) margin. Often a shadow drop for images just for grins (see above). ⚫ I find a blue link color is far less distracting than other alternatives. Many sites seem to prefer red/orange links (they stand out), my usual preference these days is for #1e6b8c (or something close to it). ⚫ I've found both drop caps and bold leading lines useful in some cases for affordance -- especially in streams of aggregated content where practice of the originating source doesn't include strong ledes, these at least allow you to find the start of a post easily. The saddest overall impression is that most web design is actively hostile to reading. |