One thing that is very interesting to me is the idea of inspiration, and as a writer, I take my inspiration from a variety of different sources. Today, I wanted to show off a design that I thought was uniquely beautiful. I always tend to lean towards the more simple looking designs, but looking closely at MIX Online you’ll notice that it is anything but simple. The typography, use of colours, lines, and spacing all appeal to some piece of my creative soul. When I look at this site, I actually wish it were my own.

While most design inspiration sites usually focus on the home page of a site, I’d like to focus on the writings section, or for lack of a better term, the blog.

If you look at a single post, you’ll really understand how amazing this design is. Pushing so many details and so much content while making it easy to read, branding the site, and organizing the secondary details in a way to be useful but not intruding on the user experience can be very difficult.

I like the simple, out of the way location of the Retweet link, and the detail on the number of comments. The centered title of the post works well, especially for multi-lined post titles as I’ve shown in my example image.

The way the author is shown off to the right side, with links to his or her profile, and recent posts is perfect and I really found the use of white space on either side of the text content helpful in containing the larger than average font size, and reasonable line-heights.

In the end, I could talk about this design all day, but I definitely wish more designers would take a cue from this site.

Check out the screenshot below, or head on over to VisitMIX.com.

It is almost that time of the year again, right after Halloween, thousands of people will be finding every free moment of time they can muster to sit down and write. NaNoWriMo is a yearly pastime for many, and a great way of getting a novel done without any excuses.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and every November it asks people to write a 50,000 word novel from the 1st until the 30th.

The official description from the NaNoWriMo site says:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

It is an amazing experience, and there are support groups all over the globe. If you’ve ever wanted to try to write a novel, here is your chance to do it with others. I’ve tried to complete it twice now since first hearing about it, but haven’t been able to block off the time to complete it. For some reason, November always ends up being too busy, and I fall out of the grove. I am committed this year to completing 25,000 words and while I won’t be “in” NaNoWriMo because it has specific rules, I will be working on a long overdue pet project of mine that I’ve been hoping to give more attention to for some time: Vanish Effect.

I hope that all of you will check out NaNoWriMo, look over the concept, and maybe take the time to involve yourself. There is no downside if you don’t finish on time, everyone is very supportive, and it is always fun.