Appearances

Obviously we’re all aware of the significance of appearances. I’ve found, however, that I wasn’t actively thinking about certain aspects of it until recently. These two videos, featuring Eugene Kan and Scott Schuman of Hypebeast and The Sartoralist respectively, made me realize how much visuals affect the consumption of a  website/blog even if the content is mainly text. More specifically, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t seeing the internet in a very good way.

I have a fair number of blogs on my Google Reader, a RSS reader that displays just the text, images and Youtube links of blog posts in a plain format. I wonder how much of the experience of reading a blog is taken away when I just skim through its RSS feed. I think I’m going to stop using Reader for a while. After all, a lot of time is put into blog design. Maybe some think that stripping it all away might even be considered disrespectful. Could you go so far as to make the analogy that it’s like watching a movie with no sound and with subtitles on?

Then again, the plain white background of Google Reader is more pleasant to the eye than some of the ugly sites I frequent. I think I’ll keep those feeds for now.

Welcome back to the spaceship.