I didnt comment to talk about that, I commented to point out a bug. Hover over your author picture. You aren’t Kyle Meyer! The alt/title attribute needs to be changed.

Thanks for catching that one, it’s been taken care of.

Best regards…

Like this idea for a website, btw. I’ll be subscribing me thinks …

Don’t confuse legibility with communication. Just because something is legible, doesn’t mean it communicates. And, more importantly, [it] doesn’t mean it communicates the right thing.

When it comes to the target audience of the Berkeley site, they’re college students. An energetic design that makes them feel a connection to the college as if the college understands them is much more effective than a bland design overly focused on usability. Not to mention the age group in question tends to be very tech literate, which eliminates the few usability setbacks that some of the design decisions incurred.

I will agree that the column wrapping on the home page can be a double edged sword, what it gains on higher resolution monitors it loses on small resolution monitors. I think the technique is a good one that can continue to be refined over time. Perhaps it could have been structured in a way that rather than leaving an empty gap below the main content area, it could have filled in there as well. This would have limited the vertical stretching effect that happens when the site is forced down to a mere two columns.

Presumably actual users of this site will be members of the department community, and therefore likely to be repeat visitors. Learnability is inherent in any interface - so although designers have to accommodate the needs of users to understand and be able to interact with an interface immediately, we also need to consider how to make the experience enjoyable and fun. Sometimes I think that this aspect is overlooked - and by adding an element of discovery we can engage regular users more.

Compare this site with it’s parent portal at http://www.berkeley.edu/ and have a think which is most likely to engage students and researchers and engender a sense of belonging…

@Adam Velasco’s site is not particularly chaotic - it follows the standard blog format, with recent content in the main left hand panel, access to archives, comments etc to the right and then the far right column dedicated to external content. Blogs are all about content and following the scent of something interesting like a truffle pig through tags, categories and related links. It’s more the freeform than hierarchical which allows a lot of room for the visitor to explore and discover - which I think appeals to the mindset of the blog-reader, which is very different to that of someone looking for product details on an ecommerce site for instance. Maybe you formed the idea that the content is disorganised as a subliminal reaction to the ‘messy’ graphic devices - interesting thought?

Regarding the site that’s the focus of this critique, I think it’s less of an issue, since it’s a personal blog and lends itself to a more experimental solution. They’re both no doubt gorgeous, but I do find myself trying to figure out how to use them more than actually using them.

SEA
 RCH

You should be asking yourself when you stopped caring about the user in favour of making some sort of artistic statement of questionable merit and zero value. Try looking at that site at 1024×768, the most popular web resolution. All those extra columns fall down to the bottom, making the page a mile long. There is no structure or sense to the page. Columns do not create order. My eye is not drawn to anything, I can’t find what I’m looking for unless I know where it is.

Acting like this site portrays good design is just a giant circle-jerk of “oh look, this is edgy and non-mainstream so it must be great!”