Defying Digital

I was cruising through Daring Fireball’s Linked List today, when I stumbled on the Ironic Sans blog. I was captivated not by the content, which is what motivated John Gruber to link it, but by the stunning visual appearance of the page design.

I have a soft spot for digital media that defies its nature and tries to adopt a more organic appearance. I suspect a lot of people share this aesthetic preference, so it’s ironic (heh, heh) that we don’t see more of it. I suspect the reason we don’t is because it’s really hard to do right.

What’s particularly good about the Ironic Sans blog is that it captures a lot of the clean perfection of digital while still being jaggy and texturized. The banner headline is perfectly legible in spite of its beautifully bleeding hatched fill. Meanwhile, the cross-hatched pattern that frames the page gives a clear border for the more-or-less conventionally faced digital content.

The juxtaposition of pseudo-analog and digital content just, I don’t know, it makes me excited. It makes me want to look at the site for its own sake. In fact, I wrote most of this blog entry before bothering to actually read the content that Gruber had linked to, a geeky encoding of the New York skyline into gray-scale representation of a histogram.

Some of you are probably wondering, if I like this digital defiance so much, why doesn’t Red Sweater’s design embrace it? Well like I said, I think it’s actually really hard to do right. But if I were a designer, I think I’d really enjoy working on this kind of digital design.

Update: Check out the blog post describing Ironic Sans’s design, pointed to in the comments by the site’s designer/author.