Dear Michael, hi folks.
Being a frequent guest on LL I stumbled across the css-design-pitch-call and I instantly thought: may this be a way to contribute to the community, give something back in return for all the knowledgable advice and entertainment I received over time?
While I started to think about colorscemes, typo and corporate design I looked at the source-code of the news-template, realized the impossibility of changing it via css, I meandered through the site's structure ... and I felt ... uncomfortable.
I visited this forum (for the first time), found out about some readability-grunts and felt even more uncomf ... sad.
Why do we visit LL since years? What has made your site so popular, Michael?
I'll answer that for myself: the LL-site has something that is impossible to buy or set up – authenticity.
We face the mature and independent valuation of a knowledgable professional with the drive for making a statement. *(... the growing number of industry-executives in m's entourage in my eyes starts zu interfere here ...)
This is not part of the all-so-hyped bloggosphere. This is in part the origin of all that. Over years and 3000 pages the site/Michael has managed to stand out of the crowd.
The actual Look n' Feel of the site is the prominent vehicle for the trust-worthyness of its content. It is (huh ; ) the door into our, the viewers, heart. This site is apparently handmade, the yield of (nightly) hours spent coding/uploading – the outcome of passion!
All this shall now be sacrificed to ... I'm sorry to say that ... bad taste?
You have yourself realized, Michael, that pitching was a suboptimal choice (as it allways is, btw.:
http://www.spiekermann.com/iblog/C19328905...244/index.html).
I honestly hope that after carefull deliberation you will revoke the decision to change the look of your website so radically into something indistinguishable from all that white noise (or brownish) out there.
And you folks, photographers, the audience ... don't you think it's worth a resolute commitment to the genuine LL-style? (Which doesn't mean it has to stay hardcoded and completely unrevised visually ; )
The ongoing serif/antiqua-discussion is, in any case, pixelpeeping – I thought that's frowned upon on LL ...
Cheers, Uwe