The @IfYouOnly experiment is going well so far, with (as I write) 700 followers who are beginning to contribute ideas for articles.

It’s also bringing forward some useful comments and questions, not least this post from Jake Brooks.

He works for a design company in Brooklyn, so perhaps you might expect him to say this — but it’s worth saying nonetheless:

What long-form journalism suffers from online is not only that it has a short shelf life, but that it doesn’t have its own design. Individualizing long-form journalism has never been the web’s priority. When space is infinite, a 500-word piece is no different from a 4,000-word piece. Each is put into the same cookie-cutter template. For long-form journalism to survive online, this needs to change.

A few years ago I made a similar point to this in a meeting at the Guardian. How do you treat long features online in a way that makes them more engaging and enjoyable? How do you get away from templates that make everything look the same? How do you make all that extra work — work which makes the article qualitatively better in print — translate into added value online?

For various reasons, it didn’t seem to get picked up internally, but it’s still the big question for me.

The truth is that newspapers and magazines use a lot of templates and a very specific design language, but they manage enough variation within those designs to stop things looking too boring. Plus, of course, they have a limited amount of information per issue, whereas websites can have an almost infinite number of pages (so the design problem becomes more obvious). So how do you combat that? Do you simply do less, so that you can devote more time to those pages? Do you use smarter content management systems?

This far from the only problem that features face online — in particular, there’s the question of how you making the larger investment in each piece worth it financially — but I know that design does make a difference: just take a look at this recent, beautiful games review from BoingBoing and tell me it doesn’t benefit from the touch of individuality.