{"id":408,"date":"2007-09-27T15:42:41","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T22:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/408\/defying-digital"},"modified":"2007-09-27T16:40:35","modified_gmt":"2007-09-27T23:40:35","slug":"defying-digital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/408\/defying-digital","title":{"rendered":"Defying Digital"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was cruising through Daring Fireball’s Linked List<\/a> today, when I stumbled on the Ironic Sans<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/p>\n

\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat’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.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/p>\n

\nThe 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<\/a> into gray-scale representation of a histogram.\n<\/p>\n

\nSome 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nUpdate:<\/strong> Check out the blog post describing Ironic Sans’s design<\/a>, pointed to in the comments by the site’s designer\/author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-links"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}