For the rest of your faves, I honestly think there’s little happy bargain. I just don’t get Vinh at all — he tends to talk in a pretty magnanimous way about grids and the sacrosanct universality of common symbols and gives us a blog with the worst vertical rhythm in web history and chucks meaningless ‘+’ glyphs all over the place. His previous design had a really nice layout, but that’s as far as it goes. What does it do for you?

Well, my hope is that the end result is a bit more than blogs. Much of the client work I do deals with editorial content, periodicals, etc. Like I said, since I’m one guy, my blog is the perfect testbed for me to try out some stuff. But that definitely doesn’t mean I think all blogs need to be art directed. This is also for the purpose of informing other work.

Thanks for the comments! I’m actually not writing any more or less than I used to (though I am gunning to write a bit more). Time hasn’t played a significant factor yet though. I’m just one guy, and my experiment is certainly not quantity of posts, but testing the quality I can produce within time constraints. I would even argue that the aesthetics of what I’m doing are secondary. The main goal (for me, at least) is the action of it; testing my theories of a reasonable process and system for exercising more creative control over the stories I’m telling.

Great design isn’t beauty alone. Sometimes what I do may result in a pleasing outcome, other times, not so much. I’m fine with that either way. But by testing this out on myself and my site, I can hopefully open the door to more rich experiences in the work I do.