Although I don’t think the design of the rest of the site quite lives up the the bar it sets, the homepage of UX Magazine is a stunningly great example of grid-based design on the web. While columnar and hierarchical grids are somewhat commonplace online, there aren’t many modular grids to be found — and especially not done this well.
001 // Keith // 10.16.2006 // 2:32 PM
Yeah, except it’s damn near impossible to tell what’s freshest. I think visually you’re right and I’m impressed with the implementation, but this site has always driven me nuts because it’s like a big kluge.
Adding something like dates would help a bit, but this is one great example of something great in theory that’s not so great in practice.
But maybe I just don’t get it.
002 // Jeff Croft // 10.16.2006 // 2:56 PM
Keith, I think you’re right — but I assumed the stuff on the front page was all from the same “issue” of the magazine and therefore they were basically all the same “freshness.” I may be wrong about that, though — in which case the design would definitely have a breakdown there.
003 // Keith // 10.16.2006 // 3:41 PM
Well, they may have gone to that model, but it certainly hasn’t been that way historically. I’ve looked at this site as a great example of a design that looks great, but in fact isn’t all that good.
Not that it’d be that hard to fix up.
004 // Baxter // 10.17.2006 // 8:27 AM
Yup. Looks cool, but the lack of any easily discernible heirarchy or organization throws me.