Leave it to the folks at 37signals to come with up a great name and method for Web design — epicenter-based design.
This is something that I, and probably a lot of designers, have been doing, both consciously and subconsciously for a while. This is a great example of the “Architectural Digest discussion” that we should be having.
Blogs are very popular — for a variety of reasons — but one thing that interests me is how popular the design of blogs have become… even for non-blog sites.
The default templates of most blog publishing systems, and most of the custom templates out there, epitomize this epicentrist design idea.
What makes a blog a blog is its content — so put it front and center and let the rest of the page elements flow around this center.
While I agree with almost all of the points made over at MediaSavvy about why Newspapers should be more like a blog, I’d like to add “Design your site to be more like a blog.”
I think this content-focused, reverse-chronological way of presenting frequently updated content — that has originated with blogs — is quickly becoming the defacto UI for presenting news online.
This will become even more so, I suspect, as RSS readers and newspaper feeds end up in the hands of more consumers.
Those apps, for the most part, default to a very “blog-like” view of the incoming entries — whether they be news stories, software updates, or even good deals on Apple goods.
