From the desk of Mr. Monk

I’ve had an idea. I love Tumblr, but there’s things it needs. Optional image titles for one.

But here’s my pitch. The ultimate entry type: a “tumble” (or tumbl).

What’s a tumbl I hear you ask. It’s an entry made up of sub entries. These sub entries are other Tumblr post types. Why? Because you can make a blog post with multiple images, quotes etc which would result in a more wholesome entry. Maybe it’s aimed at more hardcore Internet users but I think there’s a market that Tumblr could tap into.

I’ve never been a fan of dual navigation systems on websites. Obviously they are a necessity sometimes. There are 2 main reasons that I don’t get on with them.

1. If you can’t simplify your menu into one bar, your navigational structure can’t be good enough, right?
2. They’re not ‘obvious’ enough

Number 1 is fairly straightforward but inherently flawed in a handful of cases. Number 2 may seem a little vague, but all it means is that although designers use various techniques to let the user know where they are in the navigational structure, 9/10 times I believe they fail.

I ran into this as I was re-designing the Smile website. I had to us 2 navigational menu systems because of the way the site was structured. It made sense, but I wanted it to be obvious for the user where they were.

You can break down a menu item into (x) amount of possibilities.

1. Font
2. Colour 
3. Size

Fonts can be used to differentiate between content and elements. The most common use of this is between paragraph copy and hyperlinks. Fonts hold a lot of different properties, all of which can be utilised.

Colour can be applied to backgrounds or type based treatment.

Size is the most important item to me at this point. I used  this property to make my first navigation level ‘obvious’.

Many web designers think of a menu item or button as  a housing for the type. What seems to be forgotten is that you should not feel restricted. White space is our friend! There are three basic states of a button. Unselected, hover and selected. What is each stage had a different size, colour and font? That would be incredibly obvious wouldn’t it. Changing the font is a danger in reality. Font rendering is so scattederd at the moment that it is unreliable to change the font or its size. Besides this point, you would lose a lot of unity from your site. Basically scratch font from the list. The two remaining properties are good rules to follow. Do this and you have an obvious menu system that lends itself to top level navigation perfectly. Any more than 4 choices and this theory begins to crumble.