• Reported by Nate

Jeffery Zeldman was nice enough to share an open door to his design and development process with us as he retooled his personal site Jeffery Zeldman Presents. We engaged in a little premptive critique/debate earlier on this site, but I neglected to start a new post noting the fine work he has since accomplished. Perhaps even nicer than the pleasant and readable end-result redesign, was the running commentary he maintained during the process. This particular note struck a chord with me:

As designers, we are uninterested in blowing you away or using web design as an excuse to display our cleverness. We are interested in presenting content simply and engagingly (and on commercial sites, we are interested in facilitating ease of use) within a fast-loading, appropriately branded environment.
Many web designers do not see this kind of reductionism as design at all. For them, the labor of design consists in the crafting of many visual elements. For us, the labor of design consists in the proportioning and positioning of only those elements that are needed.

And while we are on the topic, Todd Dominey has completed a subtle but no less drastic retooling of his excellent weblog What Do I Know, look under the hood and read his notes to understand the full effect.

Here are some others who also retooled and/or redesigned recently: typographer, scriptygoddess, scottandrew (for halloween), hivelogic (molting currently), and monokromatik, and probably others (let us know in a comment!)

So this is one of the many benifits of a nicely crafted site with table-for-tabular-data, CSS styled, valid and structurally sound markup - namely, the state of being eminently re-designable. Something that we will hopefully enjoy more and more of from our favorite sites as time goes on.