Smiley Cat : Experiment in Making an Article Sidebar More Readable and Visually Appealing

I recently read a great article on Boxes and Arrows about the myth of the fold . Turning to the sidebar to learn more about the author, I was struck by some of the design decisions that had been made regarding this part of the page, most notably the choice to right-align all the sidebar content. As I looked a little deeper I began to wonder how much more readable the content would be if it was left-aligned and paragraphs were used. How might the visual design be improved if more differentiation was made between the sections? What if the text was a little smaller to better separate it from the article? And so on. I couldn’t resist firing up the ’Edit HTML’ feature of the Web Developer toolbar to find out. Here are the results of 20 minutes or so of tweaking: The original Boxes and Arrows article sidebar is on the left and my version is on the right Note: I edited down the long bio text in both examples for the sake of this experiment. Clearly, the l...