markhollands.com.au

A blogger’s persona is primarily conveyed by the content they produce. However, influencing the reader’s first impression of the site by imparting the essence of the blogger’s persona can help turn someone who might quickly lose interest into a reader who will come back many times.

Using a mission statement and a picture of the author are the two simple ways to quickly impart some of the blogger’s persona. Both of the sites that I have chosen to feature below have very well developed persona. They both achieve the aim of reaching their audience in distinctly different ways.

joi.ito.com

Joi has been blogging since before the word was coined and as one the most influential bloggers in the IT realm, his writing persona has a very personal and connected feel which is well supported by the design of his blog’s UI.

Joi is heavily involved with Creative Commons and the UI of his site really tries to emphasize community and interaction. The photo blog contains the many talented people that he works with, but it is rare that you will see a picture solely of the man himself adorning the top of his page.

A picture of Joi is almost hidden away at the bottom of the page. This unassuming nature comes across in his writing and it provides the site with a very intimate feel.

TuckerMax.com

Tucker Max takes an almost opposite approach. His site is adorned with a picture of himself, showing off the big, bold and alpha male persona which has made his writing so popular.

The first line of his mission statement, “My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole.” is pure Tucker. His writing is often outrageous and he makes no apologies.

First post!

I’ve been pondering about how I was going to setup my own blog, having taken a look at a wide range of blog designs and how to become a better blogger guides. Much of the advice for bloggers on the web seems to include the mantra, “Write about what you know”.

The theme of this blog is going to be about user interface design and information architecture. As this will be documenting my learning experience and career transition, I thought, what better way to design my blog than to document the interface design choices I make along the way. Not only will it give some of my early content a sense of continuity, but it will allow me to have a plain design to begin with and then test out ideas along the way.

I found that there was a lot of quality material about different aspects of blog user interface design on the web already. Jacob Nielsen’s academic articles on his Alertbox site, analysing the different weblog usability design mistakes, amongst other things. At the other end of the scale, Smashing Magazine has a collection of 45 Excellent Blog Designs. This is a collection of very pretty designs, many by graphic designers, which I found useful for looking at things as an overview.

But I still was struggling to analyse what made up a good blog design and how the different components could be used to achieve different results. After much deliberation I thought that I should try and fill the middle ground between these two extremes and also use this as an opportunity to introduce my blogging persona. So I am going to present a series of blog posts analysing different aspects of the blog as a user interface and so it isn’t a dry slab of text, I will throw in some case studies featuring some of the blogs that I read.