I was visiting Kottke.org this morning, enjoying the simplicity of his site’s design, when I flipped back to compare it to my own site’s design and realized something strikingly evident.
I’ve been using my site’s design to try to force people to see what I want them to see.
I do this by having excessively bolded post titles and also frequently bolding parts of sentences, even making quotes stand out in larger pull quotes, so as to make sure people don’t miss them.
This is utterly hilarious and also pathetically sad at the same time.
You can’t make people perceive what they can’t perceive.
Either it’s evident to them or it’s not.
In removing a lot of this boldness on my recent posts, I’m already noticing a calmness and spaciousness on my site that I haven’t felt in quite some time (probably since I was on Squarespace back in the mid 2000s).
Let’s see how this feels going forwards.