Fred Wilson over at A VC wrote some thoughts about how online content publishing is converging into a unified display based on single-column layouts because it is simply more efficient (he compares it to the simple search field at Google). He goes on to say people who’ve been designing magazines and newspapers must feel this is ugly and boring.

On online content readability:

For someone with a background that only loosely touches formal design, I don’t consider text-only displaying of articles boring or ugly. I do, however, have great concerns about how only a few developers (of RSS readers) seem to care about text readability in their (online and/or offline) applications. If we are, in fact, consuming more and more online published content, we need our tools to raise the bar in helping us doing so effectively.

Print design has a science behind it, and so does online typography. Page readability is a function of discrete parameters which can be thought out and planned in advance. Lack of plan means a poor experience - and this is the case with pretty much all online news-readers (some particularly excel at sucking - pun intended).

What we need are better tools.

Bloggers who care about their readership also care about how to better deliver their content and act accordingly by designing and writing their weblogs in such a way that readability is assured. Well, some do. But this effort doesn’t need to reside only on the publisher side - if we’re seeing a unification in the medium (and are shifting from browser to newsreader to save us time in keeping up with the information we care about) we need the tools to evolve with us as well.

Better content publishing will depend on better ways to publish and better ways for the audience to consume the generated data. Not to mention ways to interact with that data - particularly in the case of blogs, by commenting and trackbacking -, but that’s a whole new blog post in itself.