Crooks and Liars, Composition and Layout

Last week I discussed the newsblog "Crooks and Liars" as having some good competent content, but is their design and composition up to the same par? Well, let's start with some good critiquing points first.

I definitely admire the fact that they have their own website, meaning they pay for a domain name and host. That takes commitment. I also digg their Crooks and Liars banner in the red white and blue with their not-so-cute mascot to the left. It's a good start, a good identity. Their bar of advertisements and such to the right of the blogs is annoying to look at but after reading it, I can understand. They have a place where you can sign in with a username (but why would you need to?) probably to receive obnoxious emails that I wouldn't want to read anyway, but you know, if you're into that.

They also have an awards column (which surprised me because I definitely didn't notice that when looking at their content) which has Time.com Best Blog Award 2009, World Technology Award Nominee 2006, Best non-professional Blog 2005, and the Weblog Awards winner 2005. Impressive, my only question is what happened in 2007 and 2008?

Also, at least they have decent advertisements for godaddy.com, Master of Arts and Diplomacy at Norwich University, and one for Childfund International. But beside that, their layout design is pretty common, boring in my eyes.

The background color is a pale yellow or beige. There are some slight gradients to the right, but I'm sure if you weren't in tune with art and design in some way, you wouldn't notice it. I also feel like the column to the right distracts me with their blue headers and boxes that enclose different information like the advertisements and awards. I think if they got rid of the blue and the boxes, it would work together better, visually.

I also feel like they need to put more emphasis on their post titles, which might draw more attention. Other than that, their type settings are okay - they use a normal sanserif font all the way through their postings, but their links are the same boring blue that remind me of the 90's. One thing that is really working for them, though, is their small banners above each post title which say basically the subject matter of the post. It may be unnecessary because they do enough tagging at the bottom, but I think it works in their favor.

All in all, this website is just another newsblog. There isn't anything, from looking at it, that would bring me back to it, but then again I'm all about color! <- That color mainly. But I definitely wouldn't want to turn into this guy by looking at this website too often...