I’m not yet an authority on design itself; but I consider my envy in good taste, given its coherence and steady development in one direction.

As far as site design goes, two huge principles guide my envy: simplicity and density.

Unquestionably, my cyber-aesthetic runs in the direction of equating excellence with functionality. But I’d like to think this is not because of any aesthetic-degrading utilitarianism on my part so much as because cyber-dysfunctionality is so appallingly ugly. For example, I offer the winner of webpagesthatsuck.com’s 2008 worst web site award: havenworks. Don’t spend much time there if you value your sleep.

The principle of good design which havenworks is lacking, clearly, is simplicity. Music offers the best analogy here, I think. The most memorable compositions, the most stunning variations upon common musical ideas, have as their base utterly simple structures. (For example, read Jeremy Denk’s eloquent analysis of some genius-transformed simplicities in Chopin—and while you’re there, look at the model design of his blog.) Consequently, it is no surprise that the minimalists win; I envy them most.

Some minimalist favorites (having no relation in terms of content):

• Fractal Ontology
• Critical Mass (Blog of the National Book Critics Circle)
• Unfogged

But minimalism really doesn’t cut it by itself. (I hold my own site up, whose content certainly doesn’t have enough value to make it worth the hours I’ve labored to improve its appearance… I hope that changes at some point.) — Which is why I am most envious of sites that manage to be both simple and dense.

Dense sites have an aesthetic of abundance. They are like the book that you take down from the shelf at the bookstore intending to browse and replace, only to discover that the table of contents is so riveting that you waste half your day standing in the same spot leafing through it and then borrow fifteen bucks off a friend in order to buy it on the spot rather than waiting to get home to buy it cheaper from amazon. Dense sites are the ones you don’t just put in your feed reader—you set aside a few hours and go back to their first posts in order to get a sense of the original intention; you put them in your favorites and visit them in bored hours; you memorize their URLs to show friends at parties…

I close this post by tempting you to sin with me. Here are some of the sites whose simple, dense designs make me greenest:

• Cosma’s Notebooks (ridiculously simple design: incredible wealth of content)
• The Volokh Conspiracy (origin of my first serious desire to study law)
• Object-Oriented Philosophy (actually I hate his site-design, one of Wordpress’s worst ready-made templates; but I mention him as a bit of healthy self-subversion because he’s still great to read—when I started I went right back to the beginning of his archives and worked forward. Clearly, site-design isn’t everything. Great content wins every time.*)

* But site-design is nice. Like beauty in women is a great addition to personality and wisdom… Just sayin’.