Week 03 - In Class Exercise

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Critique on Zen Garden designs

The CSS Zen Garden is full of 'blog' css designs. Here are just three of many:



In order from left to right: Dazzling Beauty, Elegance in Simplicity, and Lily Pond. It's kind of mildly amusing that these sites have RSS feeds. (Floating the text around irritates me, since there's such a small space left to the right. Clicking the thumbnail will lead to screenshot, clicking on links in this paragraph will lead to the design itself.)

The CSS Zen Garden is impossibly populated with graphic-heavy site designs. It's also vaguely annoying that some of the designs are so graphic-dependent, such as Dark Rose and Mozart, the latter which takes a while to load even on a RIT connection. Then again, one of the statements on the page is that the purpose of Zen Garden is to make graphic artists take CSS seriously. Still, most obviously in the 'Lily Pond' site design above, the art is very pretty, but not very practical. The hugeness of some headers (take a look at Organica Creativa here) clearly emphasize look over ergonomics. Many of the sites have small text and/or badly organized text, and even worse than the narrow, huge-header design of the 'Dazzling Beauty' mentioned above is this Manhattan Edition one, in which the header covers a healthy three-quarters of my screen with absolutely nothing.

Most of the sites are organized on a right-aligned sidebar (as is fashionable of the present date) with the main material on the left. Most navigation is located on the sidebar—but I am faintly surprised at why no one attempted an across-the-top navigation, or even just a horizontal navigation. And then there are ones like Tiny Blue which has a nice coloring scheme and polished look—but WHY in the WORLD would a person organize their links in a vertical list on the bottom like that? Doesn't the designer realize people want to move around?

...I just found one that irked me even more: Shaolin Yokobue. A navigation bar is not going to cramp your style, graphic artists! Don't drop it in the middle of nowhere down in the guts of your page!

On the bright side, in the same collection I found a nice one: Simple.

But design is probably a matter of taste and purpose. Graphic artists most likely intend to show off their art, hence the abundance of images and glorious headers. Enough nitpicking; I'm off to work.

Group: Akiko Okazaki