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A List Apart. Redone.

It's all the rage today in blogsphere. It's pretty, no doubt. What it reminds me of is a cleaner, better designed version of any generic newspaper out there. And by that I don't mean anything negative. ALA is THE place for design resources, just as the Post is THE place for news here in DC.

ALA also started the bloggy, centered, navigation-across-the-top rage when it unveiled version 3.0 years ago. Basically, as Jeffery Zeldman points out in his article:

If the value of a design can be measured by how often it gets swiped, then ALA 3.0 was genius, for it has been copied, with and without attribution, hundreds of times. But of course it was copied all those times, not because it was lovely, but because it was generic: an adequate template for nearly any content-oriented site. Most of all, it was copied because it was easy to copy.

This redesign stops that. It gives ALA an identity as the "periodical" website for designers. We want cutting edge design news we look to ALA.

What I think here is the most impressive aspect of the redesign is the back end conversion to Ruby on Rails. Forward thinking by the boys (and lady) at ALA.

My favorite little quark about the redesign? The color coded archives. It's like navigating a parking garage. You look to the color and know exactly what level you're on. You look at the color scheme and know which issue you are in.

(Coming in a close second is the new "readibility" of the website. It no longer makes the articles seem so long and confined. Point proven by the fact that within 12 hours of this new redesign going live, I had read two full articles word-for-word. On the old site I would have to skim them because I felt that I could never finish them quick enough. Bravo!)

Overall, well done. It gets my approval. But what does that matter?

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