- Case Studies
- Simple for Sale: 37signals
- Getty One: Selling Made Simple
- A List Apart: Better Reading Through CSS
- Endquote: Sometimes Nothing Is a Real Cool Hand
- Jovino: Relatively Speaking
Endquote: Sometimes Nothing Is a Real Cool Hand
A bewildered admirer once asked Michelangelo, "How did you sculpt your famous statue of David from raw marble?" "Simple," Mike replied. "I just removed every part of the marble that wasn't David." I love that story, but I doubt it ever happened. Surely Michelangelo was too busy painting the Sistine Chapel to concoct such a pithy, anecdotal sound bite. The point of the story is: Great art is as much about what you leave out as it is about what you put in. The same could be said of great design.
Which is why I'm a fan of endquote.com (see Figure 11), the personal site of Seattle designer/programmer Josh Santangelo. Endquote looks as if Josh (1) reckoned what he wanted to communicate, (2) built a site that communicated it well enough, and then (3) removed all the extraneous design elements until only the absolute essentials remained. Granted, endquote.com's core page is not the Sistine Chapel. But, then, the Sistine Chapel isn't less than 10K, either.
Figure 11 endquote.com.