Some things you may not notice about the Subpug design
Although we’ve tried to introduce some big, bold features to Subpug - frictionless sign-in, integrated comments, curated feeds - we also like to take pride in smaller design decisions that often go unnoticed. Here are some of the more subtle things about the Subpug design:
1. You won’t see a single word wrap in the title
Akin to widows and orphans, we find single word wraps ugly. So we’ve tried to prevent them in Subpug post titles. In the image above, notice how there’s enough room in the top line for the “a” of “a bride”, but instead it wraps down to the second line to prevent “bride” from sitting by itself.
2. We try to fix wrapping text around images
We love Boing Boing, but their posts format horribly in Google Reader - most often due to text wrapping down a thin column next to a large image. We try to prevent this in Subpug.
3. We hide broken images
Some feeds don’t include the correct paths to embedded images. If these aren’t easy to fix, we try to hide the broken image.
4. We try to remove embedded social uglification
One of our design goals was to remove the amount of visual noise - especially ‘vertical’ noise between posts. A number of publishers use Feedburner FeedFlare to add ugly social links into their posts. Part of our mission is to integrate social functions more deeply into the reading platform (outside of individual posts), so we try to remove these ugly embedded links to make reading more enjoyable, while still offering most of the comparable functionality in the surrounding interface.
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We will continue to add subtle tweaks to make your reading experience more enjoyable, efficient and knowledgable.
