Blog Aesthetics
I like the cool green of Jill's new blog design, and the lack of borders, lines and frames which gives the page lay-out an open, airy look. It reminds me of the intellectual newspapers in the 80-ies and 90-ies, Dag og Tid had that open look with lots of air around the columns. Somehow, I connect this type of lay-out with Movable Type. Hilde uses lines to limit her text-blocks, but they are broken up, they can be penetrated, white space touching through the boundaries. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum does the same, only here it's the dark grey that is barely held at bay by white, a reverse white-space aesthetic. (I like the way his blog fades in and out, by the way, as if it is reluctant to come and to go, emerging from the print on my blog, dwindling into a distance as I move on.) It takes a bit of scrolling to find out that Esther MacAllum's Ten Seconds to Midnight is powered by Movable type, but already before I find it with her copyright information, I have guessed, the large letters, the white expanses of her blog, the open frames and the lines about her quotation boxes indicators.

What I wonder is if these are options in Movable Type to the exclusion of others, if they just happen to be in fashion at the moment, or if people who happen to like a certain design switch to/choose that client to publish their blog? I expect that it's possible to do the same to all types of blogs: blogger-blogs have their typical "look", I expect others do as well, but does that mean that picking blogger or Movable Type is a choice which has more to do with form than function?