August 14, 2009
A book of blogs
‘Blogs – Mad About Design’ is a heavy tome, about 5cm thick, with over 250 design blogs listed and illustrated. A great resource of course, with selections including magCulture and many friends including Noisy Decent Graphics, CR Blog, Slanted and PrintFetish. Yet there’s a little niggle in the back of my head – wouldn’t this be better as a website? The print production schedule means the images are all slightly out of date, and you really want to be able to just link to the sites that catch your attention.
But it’s value as a snapshot of the ever-changing design blog phenonemen is supported by it’s inclusion of Design Observer. That’s the old Design Observer blog site, before it’s recent revamp as a multi-channel website experience. I’m not against change, and online things haver to keep moving – I wish I had more time to dedicate to developing magCulture. But looking at the old Design Observer, I can’t help feeling the people behind the site have lost sight of what was great about what they were doing. The personal experience that the blog provided has been supplanted by a rather average corporate website.
‘Blogs – Mad About Design’ is published by Barcelona’s Maomao Publications.
6 Comments
Comment on August 14, 2009 by Michael → Linefeed says:
Linefeed declined an invitation to be included in Blogs: Mad about Design mainly because I couldn’t work out what the value of placing a bunch of tiny screen shots of blog in a book about design was. Like you said, because of the very nature of blogging, this book was out-of-date before printing even begun. I still have trouble seeing the appeal apart from documenting a recent phenomenon I guess.
Comment on August 17, 2009 by Marcus says:
Recently I did a search on the term “design blog” – just to see what came up. The search resulted in 256,000,000 listings. Yes 256 Million design blogs, or thereabouts…
Comment on August 17, 2009 by Trance says:
I got three trillion results, and I expect a few hundred thousand more to begin before lunch…
I’d start one myself of course, but I’m too busy designing the online version of a design book about books about design blogs.
Comment on August 17, 2009 by Smith+Fritzy says:
@Marcus I think your search results may have been greatly skewed by your search terms :) Plus, the amount of blogs that actually keep updating themselves with relevant content is probably pretty slim.
Comment on August 18, 2009 by Joe Clark says:
Very little was ever “great” about “what Design Observer was doing.” These people already wrote for print. They never figured out they weren’t still doing that, or that “design criticism” of their preferred sort is simply unwanted.
Something else unwanted? A book of blog-post printouts and screenshots.
Comment on December 12, 2009 by Design Blog Book | simple style says:
[...] via: _magculture [...]
