Adrian Zumbrunnen wrote a beautiful piece on reading. I wish more designers of community platforms would read it. Discourse is trying, but I still find it busy.
On the web, we are confronted with an unprecedented amount of distractions that gave birth to various tools like Readability, Instapaper, Adblocker, etc. Attention span shortens while the quality of reading experiences declines; ultimately leaving a lot of great content out there undiscovered, unloved, unshared and unread by most.
This bit on images is right on. Stock images should die.
This image didn’t just interrupt your reading flow, it’s also dull, boring and does an impeccable job in boring the shit out of every other visitor too. What does this kind of image actually communicate? That a company has really nice pens? That people actually work together or the fact that they work with laptops from 1999?