Comment by pulkitsh1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pulkitsh1234 | Hacker News Reader

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Personally, I feel the main part where I face the most difficulty in writing blog posts (for companies), are illustrations which adhere to the branding guidelines/style of the company. I feel these custom illustrations are something that makes the blog stand out and the content easy to consume (attractive?) for a general reader.

Even if there are no direct instructions to follow the design principles/themes of the company, it kind of makes sense that there are some underlying design principles that all the tech blogs are adhering to (in terms of videos, animations, illustrations, code snippets).

I know about tools like [1] but they are fairly basic (afaik) in terms of visuals.

For instance, look at the amount of work in creating illustrations for [2], it seems they had someone assigned from the design team to help with these. Another example is in the blog post [3] linked in the original post.

[1]: https://www.websequencediagrams.com/, https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/ [2]: https://www.toptal.com/ruby-on-rails/decoupling-rails-compon... [3]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2019/06/leak2-2.p...

We are really lucky at Cloudflare having a just amazing designer https://twitter.com/kkblinder who can create an illustration or diagram so fast I still don't know how she does it.

Could of years ago I wrote a blog post explaining Spectre and Meltdown (aimed at the relative layperson): https://blog.cloudflare.com/meltdown-spectre-non-technical/ She did the illustrations based on a really vague explanation by me of what was needed. I think they really made the piece.

More recently, she helped me with state machine images in this piece: https://blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-the-cloudflare-outage... Here she did them in the style of an old CS paper.

One of the best pieces of feedback I got at Heroku was don't stress too much on it being perfect. In fact you can make it rough as if drawn on a napkin so it intentionally isn't visually polished and it accomplishes its goal. I in fact started doing some of this way back at Heroku 9 years ago and the approach worked well. Now I've leveled that up with an iPad and paper.

Yes, there are places that have designers and they're a great resource, but don't let that be a blocker. If a company has a designer that can be dedicated and support such awesome. If not just try something and see what works, then keep using it.

Edit: An example of very crude/napkin style drawing - http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2011/11/07/how-heroku-works-ma...

Now that you mention it, Ben Thompson uses this hand drawn art style at Stratechery[1] - it seems like something that is easy and fast enough to do with one of the countless iPad drawing apps and an Apple Pencil.

[1]: https://stratechery.com/

I'd say a consistent style or pattern is important, but illustrations, specifically, are not required. Check out the Harvard Law Review. It contains thousands of articles without an image.

https://harvardlawreview.org/

I think part of the issue is some places (where I am too) use medium for their blog and medium requires an image. Not sure if other blogging platforms do the same though.

> Medium requires an image

Is that why so many medium posts have an irrelevant and distracting image that has to be scrolled past? What an idiotic requirement.

Medium claims to have awesome presentation but I always read their articles in “reader” mode to get rid of the pointless distractions.

It's not a Medium requirement. I've published plenty of articles without images, and the site just adds a blank box as a placeholder.

However, a lot of 'become popular on Medium' guides recommend you use an image, and an image likely looks better than a blank box does, hence all the images.

I didn't know about this requirement either. I'm reminded of what Jakob Nielsen has written on the subject:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/photos-as-web-content/

> Summary: Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" web pages.

I always would want a company blog to be under a company domain, which Medium doesn't allow any more. For various reasons: from a branding/search perspective, for flexibility (e.g. being able to embed whatever you want for visualizations, examples, ...) and to be able to move it without breaking all the links (e.g. when you finally decide Mediums constant popups are a bad look for your professional representation)

Know your audience. Illustrations can certainly be helpful to a general audience but they won’t save poorly organized content. The written content should flow well enough to stand on its own.

If you are writing a blog where corporate branding is associated then commandeer a graphic designer from your employer. They are going to be more in tune with the company’s legally approved branding guide and likely to produce better quality visual products in less time.

The images at the second link are so nice! curiously enough, I wasn't seeing them because they were being blocked by Pi-hole (with default block lists)...

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