You ever work on a project trying to change out how something works and uncover a beautiful elegant extensible design that just makes it a snap? Me neither, but if I do run into such a phantasm, I’d probably get very excited.

Well that’s how I feel about A List Apart’s new design. It just makes me go “Unnnhhh!” (and that’s a good thing in case you didn’t know).

Taking a look at it, my first thought was “Steal Steal Steal!” And by “Steal” I mean, “Be Insipired By”.

It’s such a cleanly laid out site that makes good use of screen real-estate. I think current web-design is often stuck in late 90s mentality that a page width has to fit within 800 pixels. Heck, my own site is stuck in that mentality. But I noticed that A List Apart (ALA for short) requires at least 952 pixels of width to fit it all in. By not kowtowing to the remaining grandmas who still can’t crank the resolution above 800x600, a lot of space is opened up to present more information in a much cleaner fashion.

If I didn’t have so much work to do right now, I’d redesign my blog right now.