I tried to login tumblr today and I was noticing that they have increased their headers font sizes to ~40px, then I started to wonder how does the other social networking sites have their login info and I wanted to do a comparison.

Here are some of the sites I visit everyday.

Personally I like to bump up the font sizes but I think Tumblr has gone little overboard. This is way too big to makes me uncomfortable even and its probably suited for audiences under 8 yrs old.

Ning, uses a simple and straight forward login screen. Two things I would have done it differently, the word “Sign” is repeated for about 6 times in this single page. And the arrow art is used for both a button and as a tab thats not clickable.

Last FM, the site I used to love to return before the redesign. aaah, now its just another music site. Login fields are quietly present in a corner in the homepage, where I think a little more design or a nicer layout could be used. And I wonder why their buttons are so lifeless.

Vimeo, I love everthing the illustrations in this login page. I am sure every designer would too. We dont get to see such rich experiences in a public service site. But I also hope they dont change it out when they become huge and have “business asks”.

Threadless, now this is the kind of login screen I think should be used everywhere. Seamless logins. No getting out of the page, just a rollover on Login and you get the input fields. CLEAN!

JPG, is another service that has seamless login. It has the slick function of input fields appearing in the header when you click Log In. So its a part of the page at all times. WIN!

I think that summarizes my little study on logins today!

Ofcourse I have left out the giants like Yahoo/Google/AOL/Facebook as I wanted to compare only the newer & nicer social networks.