Tags: graph

Some lovely people have recently made some lovely websites.

Dan has launched his type foundry, Simple Type Co. and it’s gorgeous!

For as long as I’ve been making websites, Dan’s designs have been an inspiration: Corkd, Dribbble, his own website; whenever he unveils something it always sits just right with me.

Oh, and I love the tagline for Simple Type Co.:

Never perfect. Always a-okay.

Someone who is a perfectionist is Marcin. He’s been working on his book about keyboards for years now (the Kickstarter project will launch in February) and he’s made a stunning website for the book called Shift Happens. Click around and find out.

Mandy has a lovely new professional website, courtesy of Ethan. It’s called everything changes. I love the subtletly of the different colour schemes for dark and light modes. It’s almost as if Ethan knows a thing or two about responsive design.

Look! Jason has new professional website too. The text is just scrumptious. It’s almost as if Jason knows a thing or two about typography.

And look! Lynn has done it again—a new site design for a new year. Beautiful stuff, as always—have a look through the archive if you want to the creativity she puts into this every single year.

All of these people are my web design heroes.

Gerry talks about “top tasks” a lot. He literally wrote the book on it:

Top tasks are what matter most to your customers.

Seems pretty obvious, right? But it’s actually pretty rare to see top tasks presented any differently than other options.

Look at the global navigation on most websites. Typically all the options are given equal prominence. Even the semantics under the hood often reflect this egalitarian ideal, with each list in an unordered list. All the navigation options are equal, but I bet that the reality for most websites is that some navigation options are more equal than others.

I’ve been guilty of this on The Session. The site-wide navigation shows a number of options: tunes, events, discussions, etc. Each one is given equal prominence, but I can tell you without even looking at my server logs that 90% of the traffic goes to the tunes section—that’s the beating heart of The Session. That’s why the home page has a search form that defaults to searching for tunes.

I wanted the navigation to reflect the reality of what people are coming to the site for. I decided to make the link to the tunes section more prominent by bumping up the font size a bit.

I was worried about how weird this might look; we’re so used to seeing all navigation items presented equally. But I think it worked out okay (though it might take a bit of getting used to if you’re accustomed to the previous styling). It helps that “tunes” is a nice short word, so bumping up the font size on that word doesn’t jostle everything else around.

I think this adjustment is working well for this situation where there’s one very clear tippy-top task. I wouldn’t want to apply it across the board, making every item in the navigation proportionally bigger or smaller depending on how often it’s used. That would end up looking like a ransom note.

But giving one single item prominence like this tweaks the visual hierarchy just enough to favour the option that’s most likely to be what a visitor wants.

That last bit is crucial. The visual adjustment reflects what visitors want, not what I want. You could adjust the size of a navigation option that you want to drive traffic to, but in the long run, all you’re going to do is train people to trust your design less.

You don’t get to decide what your top task is. The visitors to your website do. Trying to foist an arbitrary option on them would be the tail wagging the dog.

Anway, I’m feeling a lot better about the site-wide navigation on The Session now that it reflects reality a little bit more. Heck, I may even bump that font size up a little more.