We've spent a lot of time using other people's web sites, which is the reason ours is the way it is.
This site is designed to load quickly. We've discovered that sites that take a long time to load drive us wild. No matter how many big, beautiful graphics a site has, if they take ages to load we're down the road. Graphics on this site are here for information, not to dazzle or distract.
The site is organized simply. We find convoluted Web sites, where the designer has not carefully thought out the purpose, the "look" and the organization to be frustrating and irritating. Web design and web mastering take a lot of time to do well. bigarade is a very simple site compared to many, but we are authors, not web jockeys. We want our words, our thoughts to be easily accessible. We've chosen a simple design and organization, and we'll keep it that way. In the words of one of our colleagues: "you can only put so many warts on a toad and then you have to get a new toad". We're working with a young toad that doesn't have too many warts. We'll try to keep it that way.
Elegance is a matter of taste, but "elegant," in the scientific definition of the term, implies something simple and functional that solves a problem quickly without any "tarting up." We like simplicity. It was our choice for both the borders and type faces at bigarade. We do not have flashing ads or dancing graphics. We've chosen simple typographic design. We've avoided bombarding the reader's eye with too many distractions. This site is a medium of communication, not the reredos of a Counter-Reformation church meant to dazzle the eye and overwhelm the soul.
The content of the site is meant for the intelligent appreciator of good food and drink and of life itself. To paraphrase the words of a highly respected Wall Street Journal writer, we write "for the smart guy on the next barstool." In line with that philosophy, we see no need to write in sound bites. We think that material of any length can be put on the Web successfully if it's interesting and useful.
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