Whilst googling recipes for bacon-wrapped sirloin and listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy,” I took a break (out of frustration that I have no mustard on hand…) and did some blog-design browsing. (Blog-design browsing involves surfing around one’s favorite blogs and the blogs they link to, mainly ignoring content in order to examine their layout, color, and typographic decisions.)
I found the interesting blog Voyou Desoeuvre, which certainly has a striking design—at first repulsive, and then fascinating. Then I found the blog’s colophon. What I love about this little design explanation are the variety of reasons enumerated. Aesthetic: “the way in which it combines cartoonish, pin-up art with a grid layout and geometric sans-serif font;” historical-political: “this seems to me to represent beautifully the peculiar modernism of the 1950s, a modernism of the banal, in which what had been a heroic futurism in the 1930s became commonplace;” concretely allusive: “the inspiration for the current design of the site comes from 1950s commercial art, particularly the collection of adverts at Plan59, and even more specifically a 1954 advert for Jantzen swimsuits by Pete Hawley.”
For the time being, Voyou Desoeuvre takes the prize for most interestingly intentional blog-design. (Even if I personally could never live with that design on my own blog.)
I’m interested to hear what you thought of Democracy.
I liked it. He did two incredibly healthy things: implied that “democracy” has not come to the USA (or it wouldn’t still be coming) and he focused on the symptoms of change, evoking an unrestful, revolutionary USA rather than a triumphalism of the left or right.