An increasing number of design and IA sites are designing pages without any visual heft. The current move toward minimalist page design is prudent in the world of RSS and PDA feeds but makes for a rather lifeless browsing experience.
Gray text instead of black is the biggest offense. My eyes are feeling the strain of too many #666666 references on sites like IA/ and Xblog. On an LCD screen, the text is more difficult to read, not more pleasing to the eye. Note that Boxes and Arrows, an early adopter of the so-light-it’s-going-to-drift-away color scheme, has wisely pulled its body text designation back to black. The rest would be wise to follow suit.
Similarly, visual minimalism in page layout is pleasant enough, but please, give your pages some weight. The current weblog trend is gray text, pale non-underlined links, two spartan columns, and not much else. Yawn. A very fine line exists between basic and boring. C’mon, insert a third color or fill that open space a bit. Go ahead. I dare you.
What innovation can there be if leading-edge Web thinkers are publishing pages that look like glorified .txt files?