Wrapped up a client project this weekend. Happy with it.

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Stumbled again across IL, a men’s lifestyle magazine, led by the design trio of Francesco Franchi, Luca Pitoni and Ilaria Tomat. Paging through the spreads today and paging through the NYT magazine spreads yesterday prompted two large questions: 

1. Why do most of our websites (especially newspapers and publications) use white backgrounds? White is harsh, and harsher still when it’s made of light and not just paper. The Lapham’s Quarterly website is a happy exception. Anyway, had been mulling this over for the past few weeks, trying to figure out how to do this (more humane page color) to screens, and IL has sparked some thoughts. Cupping my hands around the embers for now.

2. Single-column text is beautiful and far more readable than the busy, packed newspaper sites we have now, but — misses the pleasure of scannability. There’s a certain freewheeling, kinetic feel to opening up a newspaper page, with its many stories intertwining, or a magazine page, with its many columns and sidebars. I don’t think the current frenetic feel of publications online do this effectively, but neither do minimalist, blog-like designs. There isn’t a design that works for a relaxed diving in and out.

Yet.