Ideas Are Easy, Reality’s Different

There has been a rising trend in blogging over the past year or so towards an art-directed type blog, where each post receives a custom design, with only minimal aspects staying consistent across the whole site from start to finish. It’s an incredibly intriguing concept, and one that I am incredibly interested in having a go at doing myself.

There are a number of things holding me back from deciding to go ahead with this, not least among them my back catalogue of posts, most of which are not of a quality or a specific theme that would allow me to design a page around them. Also, my complete lack of ability with graphical editors would mean that I am stuck with using colour, text, and the most basic of graphics. Another is the time commitment required to take a post from idea through to completion and publishing—I just don’t have the time free to do it.

The final problem is that of content management. I don’t like the idea of using something like WordPress that would need to be hacked significantly to do what I want, and the options that provide me with what I want to do don’t offer an easy, native comments solution. Sure, I could go sans comments, but I’ve been down that road before, and it was less than enjoyable and prolific.

But still, the desire sits at the back of my mind, gnawing away at my will to ignore it. I’ve had a few ideas of how I could do something, and I’ll go over them here, but the fact is, if I did decide to go down this route, I would end up being a curator rather than a creator. Not really something I want to do.

Designer Mixtapes

This is an idea that I quite like actually. A common interest amongst most of the designers that I admire seems to be music, and where theres music, theres mixtapes, or at least playlists. I had the idea to approach some of my favourite designers and ask them if they would be interested in putting together a mixtape, complete with cover art, and designing a page for it. They could choose whatever theme they liked (if any at all), and go hell for leather at it.

The problem with this, however, is one of copyright. I don’t want to be putting collections of MP3′s up on my website for download, and violating artists copyright. But I wouldn’t want to be curating a collection of mixtapes, without having them available for download either. Links to iTunes, with Magic Mixes or whatever they are called seems like an obvious solution, but one I’m not sure I’m comfortable with.

The List Post

Exactly the same as the above, but rather than asking designers to create a mixtape and have them design a page around it, I would ask them to come up with a Top 5 list. Once again, theme or topic would be left open to the designer in question, and they can go crazy with whatever they want to.

Do you think either of these would be a good idea? Have any other ideas that you want to share? Feel free to let me know.