It used to be that when you launched a new website you would have two to three years before the design started to feel dated.  Given how quickly things are moving now, a design can start feeling stale after as little as six months.  The battle against dated design is constant.  While its design was only sixteen months old, we had gotten really sick of the design of our blog, Brick by Brick.   We needed a change.  So today we are pleased to launch a new version we think is a huge step forward (see a before and after here).  Following is a breakdown of the primary improvements we made.

Readability

I’m stating the obvious here, but your blog should really be about your content.  The design should get out of the way and let the posts be the star.

Our primary focus in redesigning our blog was to better showcase the content itself  by increasing readability.  To achieve this we:

• Switched our primary font to Georgia.   We chose Georgia because it works well with the font used in our logo (Avenir), is a pleasure to read, and isn’t used on every site on the web like Arial. I think it adds a bit of elegance to the blog.
• Jumped on the big type bandwagon and upped the sizes of our fonts throughout.
• Switched from full justification of text to the justify left, ragged right style.  Full justification is more elegant and looks better on first glance, which is why it is still the dominant approach in book publishing.  Left justified, ragged right is easier to read online and has a bit more of an informal look, which we thought appropriate for our blog.
• Changed to a one column layout.  Our previous blog had a sidebar with a list of recent posts and a subscribe box.  We found that very few people were clicking on any of that stuff, and going to one column gives us room for larger images to accompany our posts.

Illustrations

We have a talented team of designers that we frankly don’t utilize as much as we should on our blog.  To rectify this we decided to have our design team develop quick illustrations to accompany most of our posts.  They did the illustration for this post, as well as for this one and this one.  I love them.  I think they really add something to our blog.

Responsiveness

Our new blog is completely responsive, so that the layout adjusts along with screen size.  This means it looks great on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.  Nearly all the sites we are building now are responsive to some degree, so it made sense that our own blog would be.  We think this is how sites will be designed moving forward.

Let us know what you think.