McCain, pour homme
Jun. 5th, 2008 10:36 amI liked John McCain's old, black, magnificent website. In response to Barak Obama's presumptive nomination, his campaign has rolled out a new theme and layout. That website's design aesthetic sucks.
A quick review of something I wrote back in November of last year about a certain candidate's website:
Oh, Gods, the background! The background! What the heck is this, the circus? Look at those stars! The last time I saw a background like that it was on the side of a carnival ride, the kind that gets a cotton-candy-and-greasy-corndog barf every hour on schedule. The website is busy; javascript graphics constantly shifting images, distracting the eye from reading what it wants to read. There's some kind of widget on top of those images, but what it does and how it does it is not at all clear. He's still using that buffet-line lime-jello green for his "Donate" button. The whitespace all around is uneven and poorly managed.
Look at the banner logo (in the "masculine hygiene product" font) and the way it relates to the widget and image rolls underneath it: they don't grid properly at all. It makes the website pinch distractingly. Worse, go to "site map"; the left nav bar is a few pixels too low, revealing poor border and margin management with CSS. Form fonts don't correspond with the overall font of the page. Typography management is underwhelming. And the bottom of the sidebar has no border, but instead bleeds into the background.
Whoever took over the Women for McCain subsite didn't follow the template correctly.
All in all, John McCain's website communicates that McCain is a follower, not a leader, who changes his site not to demonstrate his strengths but in a poor attempt to conceal his weaknesses.
Obama's overall website design hasn't changed. His team quite obviously has a solid style guide that it follows reliably, with someone very much in charge of making sure the confidence and modernity of the site is never, ever compromised. He has new widgets to communicate his thanks to those who got him this far and short entries on his future strategies.
The only tic that annoys me is the use of a serif font when blockquoting Obama himself, but a sans-serif for the rest of the website. On the other hand, the color scheme is so well-integrated with the typography (someone over there not only understands hue, he understands saturation) that he more or less gets away with it. McCain's website is a clumsy imitation of this cool, disciplined elegance, and it shows.
A quick review of something I wrote back in November of last year about a certain candidate's website:
John McCain. Bold. Maverick. Black. With a none-to-subtle silver star in a mililtaresque wingding. Lots of blue, not a lot of red. Good Web 2.0 sensibilities where needed, limited flash, reliable javascript. A thoroughly solid website, but weak on the jingoism we've come to expect from McCain. Is this man not a true American? Still, I like the site, even if it doesn't look campaign-y.It's time to take a look at the new John McCain website.
Oh, Gods, the background! The background! What the heck is this, the circus? Look at those stars! The last time I saw a background like that it was on the side of a carnival ride, the kind that gets a cotton-candy-and-greasy-corndog barf every hour on schedule. The website is busy; javascript graphics constantly shifting images, distracting the eye from reading what it wants to read. There's some kind of widget on top of those images, but what it does and how it does it is not at all clear. He's still using that buffet-line lime-jello green for his "Donate" button. The whitespace all around is uneven and poorly managed.
Look at the banner logo (in the "masculine hygiene product" font) and the way it relates to the widget and image rolls underneath it: they don't grid properly at all. It makes the website pinch distractingly. Worse, go to "site map"; the left nav bar is a few pixels too low, revealing poor border and margin management with CSS. Form fonts don't correspond with the overall font of the page. Typography management is underwhelming. And the bottom of the sidebar has no border, but instead bleeds into the background.
Whoever took over the Women for McCain subsite didn't follow the template correctly.
All in all, John McCain's website communicates that McCain is a follower, not a leader, who changes his site not to demonstrate his strengths but in a poor attempt to conceal his weaknesses.
Obama's overall website design hasn't changed. His team quite obviously has a solid style guide that it follows reliably, with someone very much in charge of making sure the confidence and modernity of the site is never, ever compromised. He has new widgets to communicate his thanks to those who got him this far and short entries on his future strategies.
The only tic that annoys me is the use of a serif font when blockquoting Obama himself, but a sans-serif for the rest of the website. On the other hand, the color scheme is so well-integrated with the typography (someone over there not only understands hue, he understands saturation) that he more or less gets away with it. McCain's website is a clumsy imitation of this cool, disciplined elegance, and it shows.
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