Josh Schulman Blog Week Two:

Ellen Lupton, in her book titled, Thinking With Type, discusses many aspects of graphics that appear in modern society. One major example of the way graphics are used is in hierarchy, an organizational concept that appears most commonly on the way and more specifically search engines and blogs. Lupton describes hierarchy as the way text is organized, pointing out certain data while downplaying others.

Blogs are extremely visible examples of the concept of hierarchy. Blogs are organized sets of knowledge or opinions that are periodically updated and then usually stacked upon on another in order to view the new updates and compare them to old posts. Blogs exist on just about every topic imaginable and are a huge part of the new media that are sweeping the nation.

However, all blogs are not hierarchically equal. Some blogs are far more organized and comprehensible, and thus attractive to readers, than other blogs are. This is clear in the comparison on the media blog on the website for the New York Times, "Media Decoder," compared to a less-renowned blog, Bad Pitch Blog.

The New York Times Blog is very well-organized. It uses distinct headers, colored blue to distinguish it from the black text and each post is timed and dated. The fonts used are modern serifs with medium x-heights and the flows well for the reader.

Meanwhile, Bad Pitch Blog is not dated and the posts are lumped together, making it difficult for the reader to understand where each post is. Also, the titles of each post are the same size and only bolded, adding to this confusion. Finally, the small x-height of the sans serif text make reading the blog difficult.

Using the concept of hierarchy, the quality of each blog is very distinguishable solely by its organization. One could tell that the blog on the New York Times is clearly superior to its unknown counterpart.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://badpitch.blogspot.com/