Thinking for a Living v3.0
The opinions expressed below are solely my own, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of my peers at Thinking for a Living. Also, cheers and hoorays for my fellow conspirers: Duane King, Shane Bzdok, Bob Borden, and Ian Coyle.
I’d be remiss not to mention the launch of Thinking for a Living v3.0, a site geared at creating and publishing thought-provoking design-related content. TFAL has been a passion project of ours for the past couple of years, and it’s really satisfying to see the site launch to such enthusiastic support. If you’ve gone and visited and read a little, thanks so much.
If you haven’t visited, I hope you can go take a look around. In redesigning the site, we tried to question a lot of the things that we found frustrating about the web: pagination, vertical scrolling (and its effect on the experience of reading), and the lack of a sense of completion as a reader. We wanted to make a place that was quiet and focused for sweet, dignified reading. If the site is called Thinking for a Living, we wanted a space suitable for thoughtfulness.
If you label your audience as “reader,” it changes a lot of your design process. You let the content do the majority of the heavy lifting to establish tone and personality. You obsess over contrast between background and foreground color for type. You think hard about grid structures and measurements. And, more than anything, you focus on the experience of reading the site. More often than not, laymen think interactive design means the interaction of the user manipulating the content at hand. In our case, the interaction wasn’t manipulation, it was consumption. The interaction was reading.
Flow
There was an unspoken commitment to flow. If we wanted the site to get out of the way between the reader and the content, it had to be easy for the user to navigate, get to the content and to jump from one tasty morsel of content to the next. This meant simplifying the interaction model.
When I think of the times I’ve achieved a sense of flow using the tools on my computer, it’s typically with the keyboard and hardly ever with the mouse. For me, computer-savvy as I am, using the mouse is always a hunting-and-pecking sort of experience, because I can’t achieve any muscle memory about where the objects I desire to click on will be located. (Photoshop. Ugh.) When trying to achieve flow, a keyboard is much easier for me in most respects because the buttons don’t change in position. They’re there, and my muscle memory can develop.
With Thinking for a Living, we decided to implement rich keyboard support. But, really, you only need to know one button: the right arrow key. That button does pretty much everything, and does what you intend it to do, no matter where you are on the site. If you’re in an article, it advances the columns for your reading. If you’re at the end of an article, it brings you to the beginning of the next piece. If you’re on the homepage, it lets you switch between issues.
One button. One physical spot for it. Not having to think about where to click or where to go to achieve what you wish drastically reduces complexity and allows for a greater sense of flow.
Horizontal vs. Vertical
Making the copy of the site horizontal rather than vertical was an intuitive decision we made. It was logical, but it was contrarian to most other places online devoted to reading. But, we committed to it early, because the rationale seemed solid to all of us.
First, the physical manifestation of the site will typically always be on a screen that is wider than it is tall. We’ve more horizontal space, and we should utilize it properly. We’re painting a picture, and we’ve already been assigned a frame for it. We think we responded accordingly.
Second, vertical scrolling is largely disruptive to a reader because it lacks balance. When we committed to horizontal columns of text, we realized the design flexibility it gave us. Finally, we could choose a proper line length, with a reasonable type size without an awkward amount of negative space. The negative space could just be filled with another column of text.
The horizontal format allowed us to better balance the path of the eye. Our eyes got lost less frequently because the text was broken down into manageable chunks of text in each column. If I get interrupted, it’s easier for me to find my spot. And, as I progress through an article, it’s easier for me to hide the content I’ve already read.
The horizontal pacing of each column balanced the vertical measure of each line. The movement of the eye balanced out. We’ve been reading with columns for a long, long time (since the near beginning, really), and it’s time the practice found it’s way online. I’ll be talking about this in greater detail in an essay in the next issue at Thinking for a Living.
Done is Beautiful
I think one of the benefits of reading in real life (books, magazines, newspapers, whatever) is that you can gauge your process. You know how much you’ve read versus how much you have not because one hand is heaver than the other. Pages turn, and one pile of pages gets bigger as the other gets smaller. And then you’re done. You get to close the book.
We don’t really get that online. I wouldn’t suggest that information overload is ruining the world and our attention like some would say. But, it does sabotage our sense of completion and accomplishment, which I would suggest is an innate human desire. Having an end makes things better. Movies end. Symphonies have a final note. Shows have finales. Books end on a period (or sometimes a question mark).
Websites do not. The constant stream of content is the beauty and the shame of them. To “finish” a website typically means to abandon it. We thought there had to be another option. Enter the issues at Thinking for a Living, our attempt at addressing the problem. No, the idea of collecting individual items into tightly curated groups isn’t ground-breaking. It’s the staple of the magazine industry, but the surprising thing is so few online publications have attempted it. Why not? (Although, I would say that the websites that do have a structure of issues do it exceedingly well.)
Having an end gives guidance to everyone. It means that we, as creators can make a tightly considered experience for an audience. We can make decisions about what goes in and what goes out because we now have boundaries. We can, whoah, order things, and take a reader through a paced presentation of content. And you, dear reader, can reap the benefits of all of this. And when you’re done, you’re done, until the next issue comes out. You get to close the cover and have a cue to get on with your life. Or maybe you can do what I tend to do after finishing a book: have a quiet moment, take a deep breath, and see the world just a little differently.
And with that, I’ll end this long blog post. I think I’ll be quiet for a moment. Huh.
