Critique of The Elegant Variation's Visual Delivery

Weighing in as one of Guardian’s top 10 literary blogs, The Elegant Variation is a visually successful blog. The key to its success is its “zen” simplicity in visually emphasizing one key literary event or news and subordinating the other news around the star visual.

Today, Mark Sarvas, publisher of TEV, communicates his most important literary news by depicting an oversized, vermin-like caricature that announces his top news item. Sarvas places his cartoon character at the top, center position of his blog with the header, “Vermin on the Mount.” The weasel-like mammal grabs the audience’s attention immediately.

With the backdrop colors of red, pink, black, and grey, the text is simple and easy to read. His message is: “A night of irreverent readings in the heart of Chinatown.” The rest of the information is reduced to bare essentials of date, time, and cross streets. "Free" is etched in big letters, and a large heart hints of a romantic evening.

With Valentine’s Day occurring three days after the Sunday literary reading, Sarvas capitalizes on mixing literary news with the upcoming day's symbol—a heart. The images left in the readers’ minds are vermin and heart, implying an “irreverent” literary event, doused with romance and intrigue.

TEV’s background color is dark olive, complemented by white lettering. This color palette is muted to allow the visuals to take the foreground. With this visual strategy, the audience views the dominant article first, such as the “Vermin on the Mount.” Next, the other subordinate images are noticed.

On the left-hand side of the blog, the background information and online resources are organized with text only. Consequently, news articles are placed in the middle and right-hand side of the site.

Noteworthy is the publisher’s placement of images on the right column. All images on this side are set flushed to the left. This simplicity allows for a continuous reading flow for the shorter book reviews, contained in this section.

The center, main column, has more images than the other two. Each book review article is accompanied by an image of the book’s cover. If the article is about an author, the publisher will accompany his story with a photo of the author as well.

Reading Sarvas’ blog is like reading the Book Review section of a Sunday newspaper—professional with plenty of images of books and authors. Since he reviews many good reads, the mosaic of different book covers is amazing.

For his longer articles, Sarvas displays two images, usually one photo of the author and one of the book cover. The audience has a visual rest in between long passages of text. His use of block quotes for long passages of text aid the reading.

The publisher separates each post with white, outlined boxes with the date included inside each box. This visual strategy easily separates each post but is not distracting, since the colors are muted. The reader can easily peruse the boxes to find other interesting articles.