Jerry Brito

Form and function in the blogosphere

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Perhaps I’m more surprised than I should be, but I found something I completely agree with Virginia Postrel on. From the new issue of Wired:

And all of us must give up the cultural baggage we’ve inherited from the romantics, who set art against tech, and feeling against reason; from the modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from the efficiency experts, who valued function while disdaining form.

The point of her article is that we’ve become so wealthy that we now value form at least as much as function and will spend accordingly–even in down economic times. It has always bothered me when producers neglect form in favor of function and vice versa. They are not mutually exclusive, and both should be given attention if the product is to succeed.

I’ve especially felt this way about blogs. There are several very informative well written blogs out there that I hardly ever read because they are such an eyesore. (I won’t name any names to protect the guilty–and myself.) I admit that I’m probably more sensitive to design than most, but I’m sure their readership would increase with just a small investment in style. The opposite is also true. I often find myself visiting beautiful blogs of little [”serious”] substance.

Jun 19, 2003 | Comments