Parries → Moody Cog 

Happy Cog redesigned today. That is the New York-based web shop run by guru Jeff Zeldman with the greatest cred in the business as it publishes A List Apart, the top publication for web developers. But whereas the latest iteration of ALA is really gorgeous, a breakthrough, this new site seems a stopgap.

First impression: It’s too narrow. We’re now in a 1024px world, yet this is 800px wide. Second impression: They’ve retained the color scheme from the previous iteration, which is good, demonstrating self-respect. (There’s nothing worse than entitling your album Listen Without Prejudice.) But the big change they’re excited about is having their tagline be their menu, which is interesting, but for a variety of reasons makes me queasy. They say they design “beautiful websites” but web sites are digital, functional things. Exciting yes, gorgeous sometimes, but beautiful, well, maybe, but you can’t guarantee delivery of that. (In contrast, “best ideas” sounds completely fine.) Nor do I like the pat listy rhythm of the sentence itself. Read aloud it sounds obnoxious because the links are in allcaps. [Update a couple of weeks later: it’s actually pretty good, and I like “speaks to a worldwide community” after all.]

Beneath all that is a three-box introductory area with “portfolio”, “publications” and “events” links. Upon mousing over, yes, these are in fact noun repeats of the “design”, “publish” and “speak” verbs above. It’s as if Cog had two competing tracks for navigation labelling and compromised by using both, which becomes a chore for the user, who must digest the same navigation structure twice. And between these two versions of the same menu lies another a smaller menu containing “news”, “contact” and “clients”, so what we really have is a six-item menu in disguise. Thumbs down on the navigation then.

Getting to the body of the homepage, it’s split into two equal-width columns. At first I couldn’t fathom the logic dictating what goes on which, but I now see the left column is news while the right column contains everything else. Fair enough, though not obvious nor exciting.

And that’s it. To be sure, the copy is tight and smart as ever—I like the footer in particular—but this is definitely not an inspired effort. Indeed, JSM admits as such: “We managed to steal some time here and there to put [it] together.”

In the comments on JSM’s site, his colleague Dan Mall writes, “Honestly, a CMS seemed like overkill for a site like this. There wasn’t a huge need to repurpose the content or store it in a database, so we decided on static pages. We’re all for appropriate solutions to appropriate problems, and this was the best approach for the job.” I think that’s nuts. With Mark Huot on staff, how long would it have taken to stick this on top of ExpressionEngine? A day? Surely an EE site would be much easier to maintain.

Zeldman’s take, after using the great anecdote of his high school teacher’s moustache, is sharply written:

The old site told the “design for hire” story. The redesign had to tell all three stories. Usually this would be done by creating a navigation bar with labels like “We design,” “We publish,” and “We present.” But labels don’t connect; they separate. Navigation labels could point to three separate story-lines, but they would not make the case that ours was a holistic enterprise —- that our conference, our publications, and our client services business were one. For some time, I’ve been thinking about the primacy of words in the user interface. A sentence, I felt, could present our three businesses, and by its very nature, connect them in the reader’s mind. The primary navigation interface had to be a sentence. And so it is.

Yes, sharply written—more sharply written I think than the vaunted sentence itself, which is just a list and despite what Zeldman writes here does not in fact forge any connections among its elements.

In fact I believe at Deepend we pulled off on the Food Force site what they’re trying to achieve here. “The game, the reality, how to help” is both slogan and menu. It’s easier to read repeatedly than a sentence, which is vital if it’s being used as navigation, and as well as being more compact it actually does weave meaning among its elements: the phrase “the reality” suggests that what came before is merely fantasy, and “how to help” in turn suggests that this reality is bad—all that before you’ve clicked on anything to look further. The sum here is greater than the parts. And without that alchemy you can’t have beautiful.