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"I still think that the Drudge Report is an aesthetic masterpiece even though I also consider it ugly."

Jason Fried uses the Drudge Report as a case study in how good design can also be ugly:

The Drudge Report... has proven timeless. It?s generic list of links, black and white monospaced font, and ALL CAPS headlines have survived every trend, every fad, every movement, every era, every design do or don?t. It doesn?t look old and it doesn?t look new ? it looks Drudge. It hasn?t changed since at least 1997, and I believe the design goes back even further. How many sites can survive ? and thrive ? unchanged for a decade? That?s special.

There are no tricks, no sections, no deep linking, no special technology required. It?s all right there on one page. ?But it?s a mess!? you could say. I?d say ?it?s straightforward mess.? I wouldn?t underestimate the merit in that.

When you?re on the Drudge Report you?re on the Drudge Report. There?s no question where you are. The design has become iconic....

The site feels like a chaotic newsroom with the cutting room floor exposed....

One guy can run it. The site is run by Matt Drudge full time with help from an occasional part-time contributor....

I agree. There's something about Drudge that makes us want to look at it all the time. The sense that this is what the news looks like right now feels so right, even if you know it's wrong. Even that wrongness is part of the addictive power. Everything works exactly as it should.

And for all the starkness of the site, it still comes through that Matt Drudge is a specific person, with tastes and quirks. And that specificity plays out with a peculiar mix of stories, so that the big stuff is there, buffered by weird things, and the pictures and headlines are grouped to amuse us in all sorts of ways. Go there and look for some sly juxtaposition. You'll always find something.

I'll do it right now. Okay:

We've got that big phallic symbol of a missile pointing to the left, and our eyes go over and down to that vagina symbol with John Kerry poking out of it. In this symbolism, Kerry is either a newborn or a prick, but in any case, he's going to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we're told, and that's nicely thematically connected to the top story of Iran getting the atomic bomb. We see Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in his serious turban and John Kerry in his silly paper hat. This means something. This is important. Or maybe it means nothing. It doesn't matter. It's part of what bonds us to the Drudge Report.

Full post as published by Althouse on November 20, 2008 (boomark / email).