Thursday, March 31, 2005
Bizarre Weblog Design Element of the Day: Heads
Of the two dominant weblogging empires, my preferences are solidly in the Gawker Media camp. Nick Denton's outfit appears genuinely dedicated to quality content. Conversely, rival Weblogs, Inc., takes more of a see-what-sticks attitude, with 70-plus blogs and counting under their corporate umbrella. Does the world need blogs about mortgages and "nanopublishing"? And don't anyone tell the people at The RSS Weblog about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, or the jig is up. By the way, if you ever wondered why I didn't get laid in high school, please reread previous sentence.
While Gawker Media seems benign on the whole, it does exhibit one disquieting aesthetic trend: heads. Things started innocently enough with the puckish Wonkette caricature reproduced above. But then the virus spread. Apparently, in a "Hey, branding!" moment, someone decided that all new all new Gawker blogs would have a huge head atop their mastheads.
Kickass tech-blog Gizmodo used to be the lone holdout, with a spare, desktop-icon-inspired logo whose memory is enshrined here, in miniature. Then, on the dark day of Feb. 28, 2005, came the robot-head redesign. And Gizmodo fell into line. In a panic, I fired an e-mail off to Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson:
Hi, Joel --
I may be among the few who aren't crazy about the robot-head logo, but, well, I'm not. I liked the old icons and am a bit freaked out by the Gawker empire's predilection for giant heads in the logos. Is there some browser-usage study behind this design trend? I steer clear of Screenhead and Jalopnik mainly to avoid incredibly ugly giant heads when the page first loads. The heads for Gizmodo and LH are inoffensive enough but still -- heads, WTF?
Joel (he lets me call him that) never replied, which is unusual for him.
Obviously, negative commentary on The Heads, or acknowledgement thereof, is verboten among Gawker henchmen. Fine. But I mean what I said about the Screenhead and Jalopnik heads: they are so repulsive that they actively discourage my readership. I doubt I'm unique in this respect, and that can't be a good thing for the Gawker bottom line.
So given that we can rule out artistic and capitalist motivations, what's left? All I want is an explanation. They already got to Joel Johnson, but somebody will crack. Maybe it'll be you, de-interlaced Lifehacker stewardess, or you, ethereal Gridskipper Sharon Stone-lookalike. One of you has got to tell me what's going on, before things get out of hand.
I just hope I'm not next...
Congratulations to heads. You are the Bizarre Weblog Design Element of the Day.
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