Hard to read?

Readability is somewhat subjective and I think the feedback needs a little further investigation. On a 23" Apple Cinema Display the look of the site is sweet but it's hard to understand what everything does. At first I didn't know this was a blog and portfolio of a design company. There are a couple of ways to intepret the feedback, "it's hard to read".

[1] Type size is always a consideration. [I don't think that's the issue here and users should know "command +' easily fixes this]

[2] Competing elements bombarding the visitor with too much information all at once. [The double side bar on the right adds somewhat to this]

[3] Screen Resolution - It looks like your blog is over 1100 pixels wide. For people with a screen resolution of 800 x 600 they're going to have a hell of time, especially when your navigation is hidden in the upper right corner.

[4] Unexplained Areas / Confusing Headers - The "Blogroll" isn't clear and has over 32 mini icons and no description of what they are. "Cruising" isn't explained. "Tags" is a little hard to understand as well and it's very difficult to distinguish with all of the links jammed in one after the other. Note: I've yet to figure out why the mini icons you see at the end of 'tag' articles jump to 'mysterious login' pages. [This is one of my biggest issue with the site]

[5] Missing Main Header - It isn't completely clear what the site is about and it seems to be a random collection of articles with a missing 'identity'.

[6] Important Content Buried - The 'recently posted' links are buried all the way on the bottom of the site.

[7] Jumping Content - The 'Tags' area moves around from page to page.

I think it would help to eliminate one of the right side columns and go with a 2-column format. You've also got quite a bit of information in the 'tags' area. What about a pull down menu to eliminate a ton of visual overload?

I really love the design and colors of the site and don't find it necessarily 'hard to read'. It's more of case for me on it being 'hard to understand and follow'.

I thought your previous design was great. Better and more useable than this one. I can understand wanting to redesign a site but only when there's decent enough reason.

The colors are good though and I don't think it's hard to read due to that or to text size. I agree with Creative_NRG's comments about the 3 column layout, it's a bit too much and bad for people with smaller resolutions, or should I say less-huge resolutions? (it barely even fits on a 1280x screen!!)

I LOVE the new design... just freakin love it!

BUT, I can see where some of the comments made by Creative_NRG come into play. I have a 1600x1200 resolution, so the size isn't a problem. The text is readable for me, and I can always Cmnd + if it isn't.

The blog roll made perfect sense to me - very unique way to list the blogs you read, rather than posting a big long list like 99% of the blogs out there. By the way, thanks for putting my blog in your list!

I could easily do without the third column on the right if you moved the navigation to the second column.

Any time you feel like doing charity work, I'll be happy to give you a homepage link for life on any/all of my sites in exchange for helping me redesign CreativeGuy!

Great design, poor execution. Your site is obviously made with no intent of being functional within IE. Considering most people use IE this seems like a reason why your site is "hard to read". Your average internet user is not able to view your layout, transparent png's, rollover effects, etc. as you intended. If everyone had large resolutions and only used FF there would be no issue. This is not the case. With that said, I do like the design and colors used. I don't like the lack of accessibility.

Layout size:
I run a 22" monitor at 1280x1024 and don't like to have my browser any larger than 2/3rds of that size, so we're talking about 900x900 maximum comfortable viewing area (I like to have access to my desktop icons without having to use Expose or shuffle things around, I tend to drag and drop a lot). Anyone with 1024x768 (which I gather is much more typical even on Macs) is going to struggle to view your site and would probably give up with it (I would). I have been annoyed by eBay recently, who have made their pages wider for no apparent gain of function or style.

Colours and text size:
I really don't like grey on grey or black or white unless there's a good contrast, it requires more effort to read. Not everyone has 20/20 vision, and for someone like me who is only partially short sighted and doesn't need to wear glasses for every-day things, it's no good if I need to put them on because of your choice of colours or text size. I didn't actually know about the Command + function until I read these comments, so I have to assume that a lot of average users don't know about it either. I personally much prefer a white background for factual or informative pages, unless it's a subject that requires some sense of style.

Also the point that CRJ made about IE - I hate IE but I have to accept that most internet users still use it, I converted all my web pages to accomodate it with ease (once I knew what IE had trouble with - transparent PNG's, and it's very picky about table setup). I also replaced all the style= with the old width= and such so that my pages also work with Netscape 4.76, the only thing that doesn't work is the div css scroll, it just puts the whole text in like a normal full page. It looks good in all browsers, layout is consistent, and newer browsers get added functionality :-D