Good evening, internet. I would like to take a moment to discuss two developments in one of my less favourite media formats: the magazine.

One of the two magazines I still read with some level of regularity is Wired. The other is Make, which is usually beyond my level of technical expertise, but I still find entertaining to read. I assume it's for the same reason I enjoy watching This Old House and other similar shows about building things. As of the February 2007 issue, which arrived in the mail earlier today, Wired has gone through a redesign, the first I've come across over the duration of my subscription, which has gone on for roughly half of the magazine's existence.

And what did they do in this redesign? Nothing good, as best as I can tell. So here's my list of specific complaints.

1. Wired has always had a massive hardon for typography, but with this redesign they've officially gone MAD ABOUT FONTS. According to the short column about the redesign, they had four new fonts designed just for them, and they've apparently added them to their already enormous list of fonts they used in the past. On a single page within one of this issue's featured articles I counted six specific fonts in a variety of sizes. In addition to this huge set of typefaces, they also had three different headline styles (each of which had its own typeface and style), and three different paragraph layouts. One such layout was a giant wall of text, which utilized visible pilcrows rather than actual line breaks and indentations. I know the guys at Wired love to be edgy and different, but goddamn. What were they thinking? My eyes like some level of consistency.
2. The redesign introduces some rather boneheaded changes to section identifiers. Previously, the recurring section titles of "Rants & Raves", "Start", "Play", "Posts", and "Found" had clear identifiers. If you were reading a page belonging to one of these sections, its name would be clearly located in the upper-left or upper-right corner of the page, as one would expect in any sort of magazine. That's apparently too good for their new designers. Clear readable section identifiers have been replaced with 1cm squares (I am not exaggerating, I actually broke out a ruler and measured) that are filled with stylized letters which fill the entire area of the square, resulting in a tiny incoherent maze-like blip, which is the only thing on the page telling you where the hell you are. To make matters worse, there is no consistency whatsoever with where these blocks occur. It might be in the middle of the page, it might be in the lower right hand corner, it might be at the top offset to the far right, it varies from page to page, even within individual sections.
3. The new disjointed layout accentuates a problem that has existed with Wired for quite awhile now: inability to distinguish between articles and advertisements. Wired has previously played with cutting off random sections of a page and dedicating them to advertising, such as the rightmost or leftmost two inches of a two-page spread. It was bad enough before, but now that an article may take on a diverse and confusing variety of layouts, it's hard to know at a glance if that sidebar, footer or half-page of text is an advertisement or just another column. I guess this makes sense from their point of view, since it means more effective ads for their advertisers, but frankly I find it insulting when a company has to resort to deception to get me to read their ads.
4. Other miniscule things which had nothing wrong with them have also been fucked with. The Wired Logo, which has been the same roughly forever, is now made up of one font instead of two. The spine layout has also been changed for no good reason, it now has a long solid block at the top edge which has yet another (and altogether different!) Wired logo and the volume/issue listed in it. They also appear to have changed "Wired – Tired – Expired" to "Expired – Tired – Wired", which doesn't make sense multiple times.

At least the content hasn't changed. All the old columns are there, though "Rants & Raves" has been renamed "Chat" so that the title can fit in their dinky little section squares. It's all just a facelift. But it's a facelift with barely any benefits. The only good thing I have to say about it is that the section "progress bars" are a nice touch, if you can find them. Sure, they're not incredibly useful, but at least they serve a purpose and don't hurt anything, though they suffer from the same position consistency that the section headers do.

Luckily, all of my concerns can be rather easily resolved. Let's see how:

1. Get some typographical consistency. Look, ok, we know you love fonts. We get it. If you want to use a bunch of fonts, that's just super. Feel free to go nuts in headlines, sub-headlines, block-quotes or whatever, but at the very least keep it consistent within articles. I know you can do this, because it's exactly what you did for the past fourteen years.
2. Pick a layout and stick with it. Again, I don't expect you guys to start laying shit out like the WSJ, but it'd be great if when I got into an article my eyes didn't have to jump all over the place to see what block of text I should read next. Returning to some kind of standards when it comes to headers would be nice too, but more about that in the next bullet.
3. If it impairs readability, get rid of it. If you make a change, make sure it doesn't make your magazine harder for me to read. Your new headers are a prime example of this. These could probably be fixed by doubling the width of the squares and putting them in a standard place. I know you were the ones who pioneered such optical crimes against humanity as the two-page spread of day-glo green text on a neon pink background, but you grew out of that, remember?
4. Stop changing things for the sake of change. I love change. I really do. It can be refreshing, but changing things for no reason sucks.

Will the new layout make me stop reading Wired? Probably not. It's not like I'm paying for it anymore, since my $5 subscription I bought off eBay six years ago still hasn't run out. But it will lessen how much I enjoy it, which wasn't that much to begin with.

On to other things: my latest trip to Achewood (one of the two webcomics worth reading, the other of which is PBF) alerted me to the fact that apparently TIME writers can't get enough of Achewood. Please read that last bit a few more times. Let it sink in.

Granted, this is just a blog, but it's an official TIME Magazine Blog. While it's distressing enough that such a thing exists in the first place, I'm more so having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that TIME, something I equate with "dry, stuffy news I refuse to read," is reporting on Achewood, a web comic which has brought us such brilliant strips as the saddest thing and entire arcs about inducing enlightenment via weighted underwear.

To further add to my confusion with this article, did this guy just find the internet or something? Web comics largely predate blogs, and really in my opinion web comics have long-since passed their prime. All the web comics I used to read – except Penny Arcade, though this point is frequently arguable – have long since turned to shit. And nearly all of the new comics out there are shit to start with, since any pre-teen with ms-paint and delusions of grandeur can start their own. Maybe TIME writers just don't have the same discerning taste in comics as I do. That or they have way more time to kill than I do. I guess at the very least it means you can get a paycheck from a branch of a giant media conglomerate for reading web comics all day. [01.21.07@02:08]

As I recently found an interest in IDM, my cousin suggested that I check out a rather good "cliqhop" streaming radio thing from the internet. I don't spend a ton of time listening to music via my PC, usually I just do a quick once-over of things to dump on my iAudio X5L, where streaming radio wouldn't do me much good, but I'm coding now and would like to focus, so music is better than television. I figured I'd give it a shot.

I am presently unsure as to if it is a good or bad thing that this station features tracks where I have to ask myself "Is this intentional, or is my stream fucking up and making random noise?"

I think it might be a good thing, but again, I'm not sure. [01.25.07@09:15]