I recently read a great article on Boxes and Arrows about the myth of the fold.

Turning to the sidebar to learn more about the author, I was struck by some of the design decisions that had been made regarding this part of the page, most notably the choice to right-align all the sidebar content.

As I looked a little deeper I began to wonder how much more readable the content would be if it was left-aligned and paragraphs were used. How might the visual design be improved if more differentiation was made between the sections? What if the text was a little smaller to better separate it from the article? And so on.

I couldn’t resist firing up the ‘Edit HTML’ feature of the Web Developer toolbar to find out. Here are the results of 20 minutes or so of tweaking…