As I wrote last time, “The entire feel is so banal I’m already bored talking about it.” Aren’t you too?

The nav sucks

It’s a 2001-era idea of site navigation.

• Top nav is a bunch of images that indeed do look like ads. The type is merely pictures of text instead of live text that expands and contracts when you zoom the page. (But they prove they know how to place live text on top of an image in the Gallery section.) Newsflash: The entire bounding box of the image as well as the text can expand and contract if you know what you’re doing or hire somebody other than your wife to design your site.
• Why is the first link on the page “Subscribe to RSS” when, first of all, it isn’t the most important thing in the world and RSS is already located where it should be, inside HEAD?
• Is the search box a searchox or an advanced-search box?
• A list of 11px text is not what I’d call a left navbar.

Can’t these people learn to typeset an arrow?

Another newsflash: This isn’t US-ASCII text we’re dealing with here and >> isn’t an arrow.

Who the hell cares about your Twits?

Twitter is exactly the opposite of what Design Observer ostensibly stands for – intelligent, ideally longform, design “criticism.” The fact that they’re even using Twitter shows they are merely fashionable and Web-clueless. The fact their Twits are included right on the homepage shows they aren’t serious about their own mission.

In short, they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. They’re print people who think they’re important creating a Web site they think is important.

I give up

These people suck. They’ve got the wrong ideas and they can’t even execute those well. Design Observer is run by a clan of well-paid design oligarchs who would still have flourishing careers if the site shut down tomorrow. But its longevity, like New York’s, relies on an unending influx of youngsters who don’t know what they don’t know. What I don’t understand is why these youngsters, who should natively understand the Web, fail to notice Design Observer doesn’t.