The Brilliance!

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Drudge Report. Even as an Obama supporter myself and with his obvious slant against him during the general election, I didn’t care. I knew I could consistently depend on Matt Drudge to have the biggest and best headline of the moment front and center. And if it wasn’t front and center, it would be later in the day, as most other news channels and sites would follow his lead.. Jason from 37Signals (who we apparently are very fond of as of late on here) has written a brilliantly accurate article on just why exactly, despite it’s aesthetic ugliness (which is also debatable), the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Ben just sent this over to me and I was so glad someone had taken the time to put a spotlight on this. I’ve always felt like the Drudge Report worked so well because of how simple it was. Jason’s first point is that it has staying power which, if you ask me, the entire article could focus on that alone. He says “It’s generic list of links, black and white monospaced font, and ALL CAPS headlines have survived every trend, every fad, every movement, every era, every design do or don’t. It doesn’t look old and it doesn’t look new — it looks Drudge. It hasn’t changed since at least 1997…” He is so right on with this…it is not old, it’s not new. It’s a true example of ‘it is what it is’. When we were working on the design for the Brilliance, Ben and I went back and forth a lot even talking about Drudge and its effect on how we might approach this site. How it could just last throughout time, which is difficult to think about in terms of the internet considering what’s cool now is not cool 10 minutes from now let alone years from now. Anyways, this is a really great writeup you should check out. Really helps to understand how something can be good design even if it’s not “good design” at first glance…hence this statement from Jason that “A few thousand bucks a year in overhead that generates a few million a year in revenue. That’s good design.”