Review 398

Samantha’s website is fairly typical of her generation; the blog is greatly concerned with school life and friends, the design is simple, elegant yet idiosyncratic, and to really appreciate the posts you could do with being an acquaintance.



The design is good, if a little unoriginal. The single, thin column with the aesthetic relying mostly on an attractive masthead has been done to death, and is fairly representative of much of the better work of American teenagers.



There are some bad points, but of course that was always going to be the case because so much here is familiar, and so many of the mistakes made here have been made elsewhere. For a start, the font size is too small to allow people much over the age of maybe 18 to read, and is too dark; black text on a deepish purple background is a bad idea.



The site lacks structure; the front page is too long and needs to be split into a current blog and an archive, and the links at the top of the page, numbered from 1 to 6, force the user to click on them to reveal their relevance.



There’s nothing sorely missing from this site, but on the other hand there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done elsewhere already.aureate.org