Blog Review: Graphics Illustrations

Written on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele

How many good blogs about graphic design and Photoshop are there? Not very many - which is one reason why I chose to review Graphics Illustrations. Graphics Illustrations is a blog about Photoshop and graphic design, which contains some excellent tips, tricks, tutorials, examples, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Overall I really like the blog, but there’s a few things that came to my attention once I started getting into the nitty-gritty details of it all. Most of these are minor layout issues - the content is excellent though.

Different Languages? - The blog is in English, but the comment label is “komentari” and the tags/category label is “Oznake”. I’m not 100% sure what language those are in, but I can see how someone may get confused when they first visit. Best bet is to try and keep everything uniform and in the same language. Then again, for all I know they could be some hip new Internet slang… I haven’t been keeping up with that stuff lately

RSS - One thing I’d highly recommend doing is making the little RSS Button point to your feed in addition to the subscription text on the sidebar. Maybe I’m the only one who does this, but when I see an RSS button I usually click it instead of any text around it. I also noticed the URL for the subscription link and the URL for the feed auto-discovery are different. One points to FeedBurner and the other points here. Keeping them the same is a good way to ensure Feedburner is doing its little calculations correctly.

Snap Shots - I’ve never been the biggest fan of anything that pops up on my screen when I mouse over a link, whether it is a service like Snap Shots or an ad program like Kontera or Intellitxt. While this is a big turn off - the excellent content made me stay.

Post Spacing - The posts are a little cramped together. Maybe a few extra pixels between them would space everything out.

Sidebar Length - The sidebar is a bit on the long side. I’m not 100% sure what can be changed there though. If it is bringing in good click-through rates then leave it as is.

I’m just a picky fellow though, most of those things are really minor issues and the good content both on the blog as well as the downloads easily makes up for them.

Rating

My rating for Graphics Illustrations is:

Content: 9/10 - Excellent job! You’re a really talented designer - keep up the good work
Design: 5/10 - The Snap Shots were a big turn off for me in regards to the layout. The sidebar is also a bit on the long side.
Uniqueness: 9/10 - It’s hard to find a good blog about graphic design these days - I’ll definitely be adding this one to Google Reader (in fact, I already have).
Overall - 7/10 - If it wasn’t for the Snap Shots this would definitely be an 8 or 9 out of 10.