A Note about "Broadsheet" Style
I’m far from coining a style, but I want to add a note about my new navigation style you can see just up above this post if you’re not reading this via RSS. I call it “broadsheet”, as an echo of the old “wild west” broadsheet newspapers, which featured hand-built printing equipment and sometimes hand-lettering for the really low-budget papers. I can’t find good examples on the Web—books are better—but some of the hand-detailing is gorgeous and brassy at the same time. I blame “Deadwood” entirely for the increase in my aesthetic fixation with the Wild West. That being said, I’ve always liked it, so maybe it was just gasoline-to-fire.
Since this site is my own toybox, I use these pages to tinker with new CSS effects until I think they’re ready to go into my professional UX work. One effect I have in development is borders on page elements and links, and how they work throughout different interactive states. Browser support for advanced border effects isn’t stellar, but it does graceful degrade down to IE6 and alt stylesheets can cover beyond that in business settings. Based on the accessibility/usability notion that one shouldn’t rely on color alone to convey interactivity, I added border density changes and background-color changes to emphasize each interactive state distinctly.
One of the style goals of “broadsheet” is to mimic old wild-west typeface flourishes, best summed up in Larabee’s typeface “Vanilla Whale”. Top and bottom borders comes pretty close, in my mind. Eventually, I’d love to either get CSS to create the signature diagonal linking words like “&”, but I might also just sIFR select pieces in Larabee’s typeface itself, because I love his work. Lastly on the aesthetic side, I have a “low class” design idea brewing, in response to B-movies and Christopher Fahey’s “class” panel at SXSW. Think of “broadsheet” as the first salvo.
Another goal for “broadsheet” was to pack my navigation elements full of links to things I want referenced/linked/crawled. I didn’t want it to distract too much from the major pieces, so I tried to use size to indicate main components and supplemental information or sub-categories. I tried to visually mark links that open external sites, but also collect them into meaningful groups. The end result is really a “sentence” style, with B-movie, tabloid wording, to boot. Final steps: I need to complete work on my “digital self” page, which is supposed to be an “about me” page, but I’m having trouble writing anything satisfactory, so for now it’s all external links.
Coincidentally around the same time as I started my little project, Jeffrey Zeldman posted about the redesign of Happy Cog, which uses “sentence” navigation. And another friend, Garrett Murray, recently redesigned his blog Maniacal Rage with a similar “sentence”-based style and a killer hover effect. Garrett, in turn, credits Megnut for his design, which also uses ellipses and begins to wrap back to my “broadsheet” derivative.
One happy, segmented circle of people experimenting with navigation.
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