I’m sure by now if you’ve gotten to this post you’ve obviously noticed our umpteenth lay-out change. However unlike previous designs which… well obviously never stuck (Kevin LOVES to website re-designs, I think he gets off on them haha), I think we’ve finally found a decent lay-out which has been for the most part universally accepted. The most glaring change and perhaps one we’re most happy/proud of is the re-launch of the Features section. Awhile back we had taken a stab at features which just took up way too much man-power. And to be honest, the cookie-cutter Flash features really don’t hold a candle to the shit that Greg Washington cooks up in his Flash laboratory over at Inquring Mind. So we quickly gave up on that. We couldn’t churn a feature/week like we thought we could and it was simply too much for us to handle at the time.
However, moving forward the notion of features was something we never could really forget about. We’re pretty true to ourselves here and eventually we could see that Hypebeast via countless product plugs just really wasn’t contributing to the overall landscape aside from being a glorified buyer’s guide. Perhaps this coupled with the fact blogging has become quite mind-numbing and repetitive resulted in a necessary change-up. Through the shit you see on Hypebeast’s front page comes an obvious story. Most often the regular reader unfortunately doesn’t give a crap about the conceptual background which is unfortunate but by no means unexpected given our fast-paced and rapidly consuming lifestyle which the Internet has brought upon us. Regardless, for us personally I think it’s of the utmost importance to highlight the back-end of a final product. For me personally (and some may disagree), good design is a combination of good aesthetics with a proper story/background. I know some may think I’m taking it too far but that is how I feel about it, it just brings everything full-circle in a joyful union… pause. The usual blog post just isn’t the right medium to express this important foundation to product. Within one day there’s probably like 58 blog posts going through the front page, any substantial news gets pushed to the fifth page within the hour (oh yeh end sarcasm but I’m not far off but we’re starting to implement more strategies to allow us to slow our roll). As well, Kevin’s done a good job creating a nice meaty features lay-out with ample room for imagery. These days and as a personal pet peeve of mine I’m stuck with tiny ass 300 px wide images where nothing is legible and detail is sparse. We have an upcoming feature with 13thWitness and I can’t wait to see all that photographic goodness in its awesome 980 px wide glory.
Ok, enough shit-talking about the blog. After all, I’ve said it many a time, Hypebeast’s front page blog is its bread and butter and for it, it serves its job wonderfully. After all it is what pays the bills I’m pretty sure. Nothing I would change about it really and for you bitches that complain about the gallery, CTRL-CLICK and just open in a new tab. Saves you so much more time than scrolling through a full page of 30 images, allowing you to choose only the ones you want to see. In closing though if nobody was to ever read our features, I still think for ourselves it would be something that we would definitely continue to do. It’s a nice rest from telling you about this particular 1 of 3 Tibetan exclusive quadrupule-collaboration yak-fur messenger bag or describing where and when to buy this green shoe which is so painfully obvious cause well… there’s a picture in your face haha. Hopefully our features do one of the following or even all three of them… educate, provoke and incite. I used to be all about pictures to fill the space but I’ve been getting lazy sorting out my images and have yet to sign-up for my Flickr Pro account. As I touched upon before, few will probably get to this point cause I didn’t even have a title picture to draw your interest but what’s the point of adding something irrelevant I guess.