Apr 18
Lots of ideas here. It’s as if the folks at espn are intent on bringing great magazine writing to the web, and preserving the flavor of how we’d expect to see it in print. It flies in the face of what we’ve all heard, …that limitations of the web prevent great design. Well folks, great design is about taking those limitations and embracing them. Like Zeldman once wrote: “Limitations are the soil from which creativity grows.”
Wanna see all these in higher res? I took some screenshots and made a pdf.
These special “E-Ticket” articles come out once every two weeks or so on espn.com.
30 more after the jump…
April 18th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Hey these are great! I find them unsuitable for everyday content though. Seeing as you state these come out once every two weeks ESPN seems to agree. The problem is that to design great, unique layouts like this on a regular basis requires a lot of additional expenses a lot of companies lack. You’ve basically got to hire an in-house designer. Most small to medium sized businesses just couldn’t justify the costs, let alone afford them.
But thanks a lot, this is a great post!
Oh, btw, I see you’re hosted on bluehost! Me too. Did you get the email about the glassbead network, developed by one of their employees? It’s great, do a google search.
-GS
April 18th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
I think I see a pattern! Just having a big picture at the top of your page, then a column of text is a bit of a limitation in your design, yes?
April 18th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Mate, forget what the previous post said the work is great and you have produced some high visual impact stuff the limitations are in ‘Wow’ head. Keep it up.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
In my personal case I wouldn’t say that the design is ever limited by the web. #1 limitation is the budget. #2 limitation is the client. Maybe around #8 would be the web (up/ downtimes/ banwidth).
April 19th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Nice but very simple recipe.
It’s just a very good image with some text under it.
Like Wow says, they are actually very limited.
April 19th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Hey! You’ve got great designs for inspiration here! Great work, mate! Regards!
April 19th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Most of those designs are actually pretty straightforward to code; a single, large header image with a column. It gets much more challenging when you have three or four columns of content that need to be perfectly lined up in multiple browsers and resolutions.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I have to say that I fully agree with you. I think that if you are a great designer then limitations are nothing but challenges in an ever changing world. Only a few years ago many designers were worried about the advancement of the web taking over the traditional ways of teaching and designing on paper. I don’t know about you guys but it seems that designers are more concerned with identity on paper as well as online.
This dividing limitations also have created a new stream of jobs for Web Developers that work directly with designers in order to get the design to work on the web better.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I really enjoy reading your blog posts on a regular basis, but on this one I’m going to have to disagree with you. The designs are very nice, and extremely eye-catching, but they are not indicative of any intense coding exercises.
In the entire set of screenshots you provided, I only saw three page designs that would require any amount of additional effort. Other than that, every single design shown on the page could be sliced up and coded within a matter of minutes with minimal effort.
If you’re curious, the three designs on which I’d have to think more than a minute or two in order to develop are:
Rolling in rubles
All too perfect
Under the Hoodie
The downside I see to every single one of these designs is the immense use of high-quality graphics. I would imagine that, on a slow connection, each of these pages would probably take several minutes to load, if they ever loaded properly at all.
Still, thanks for sharing, as they are very nice to look at.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:23 am
[...] Don’t Tell Me about Design Limitations of the Web - Collegewebguy (Drew) shares some excellent examples of ESPN taking design on the web to the next level. [...]
April 28th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Those layouts really look nice but again, you cant extend reuse or do anything else with them. Its just like having magazine.
These has already been done 10 years ago. As far as reuseablity, they dont have any, they dont even showcase any advanced things css can do. I doubt any of them have more than 500lines of css. I’m not complaining or saying that if designs use less than 500lines are bad, I’m just saying they’re good for one shot events or anything that doesnt need extending.
They’re limited. And if you’re part of the statistic that has 1024×768, i’m definetly sure, me and my grandma wont scroll down.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
…djoaniel: You and grandma probably don’t read.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
These are simply breathtaking. Despite what Djoaniel said, I tend to think that the complexity of the code doesn’t always matter as much as the design itself. Here, your ability to design is beautifully showcased, and whether you did it with 500 lines of CSS or not doesn’t matter because the viewer is comfortable. In fact, sometimes the simpler the code and the layout, the better the site. Make it beautiful AND simple, well, that’s perfect web design right? Of course, there’s different audiences and purposes for each website, but you’ve created perfect designs and layouts for the content you’re putting out.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Bad comparison. A lot of folks out there try to make a site for everyday content. The designs you portray can be taken as equivalent to newsletters which you send out in bulk mail - where you won’t send out the same design time and time again.
After a point, the design will get stagnant and you will have to change it. I’ll have to agree with GeniusSteve who says that you need a lot of $$$ to implement something like this, especially sports - licensing the photos themselves is a huge amount.
Don’t get me wrong, the designs are nice to look at and does its job well, what is incorrect is comparing the article which is talking about limitations of the web and comparing them to pages that are meant to be as “one off” publications.
Other good designs you may find at:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
If you’re interested in a nice sports design, this one I feel is top notch for everyday content:
http://www.ryangiggs.cc/v2/
November 11th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
[...] in April, I posted a few dozen screenshots of espn’s “E-ticket” web features and wrote incoherently about how they’ve done a great job of introducing feature-styled [...]